Eric Suesz
Every year, Autodesk releases its State of Design & Make report. This annual report compiles the thoughts and opinions of professionals across architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO), design and manufacturing (D&M), and media and entertainment (M&E). The new 2025 version of the report collected more data than ever before, surveying 5,500 industry leaders to find out how they feel about their opportunities, challenges, and attempts to meet the trends of the day.
This year’s big takeaways? Many Autodesk customers, which of course includes many opinions from water professionals (the AECO category), are feeling uncertainty as they manage broad economic volatility, in particular around cost controls, rapidly evolving technologies like AI, and a still-widening skills gap.
1. Global uncertainty is affecting organizational confidence
The biggest trend this year is around economic uncertainty. Leaders feel more uncertain about the future and less prepared to face it. Leaders in the United States saw the biggest decrease in preparedness and those in Canada saw the largest decrease in uncertainty.
Some of this appears to be a crisis in confidence, but some of it is clearly based on real-world trends: geopolitical and economic turmoil, continued inflation, and supply-chain fragility. For example, 49% of business leaders say their supply chain is fragile. Considering all of this, it is perhaps not surprising that cost control is top of mind for leaders, with 33% citing it as their main business challenge.
It’s worth noting that this crisis in confidence is more pronounced at organizations that have not yet achieved digital maturity. Based on these survey results, 76% of leaders at digitally mature organizations feel prepared versus 47% at less digitally mature organizations. This trend also manifests itself in supply chain conversations, with digitally mature companies being 41% more likely to diversify their supply chains. The takeaway: digital transformation increases business confidence.
2. Initial excitement around AI cools but it’s still considered essential
Optimism about AI fell, with perhaps some coming to the conclusion that the AI revolution will not be as quick and easy as hoped. This is not to say that leaders are uninterested in applying AI and machine learning technologies. Indeed, they are very excited about the efficiency gains they can realize, but perhaps they are also acknowledging that the disruption around implementing AI will affect their own organization – not just everyone in theory but themselves in actuality.
Nearly half of business leaders surveyed agree that AI will be destabilizing, and this up from 41% in 2024 – a 20% year-over-year increase. They have worries. Are the new ways of AI cybersecure? Will the results be reliable and unbiased? Does signing up for a third-party service that provides AI capabilities have privacy implications for our company from a data-sharing perspective? There are many unanswered questions.
However, it is worth pointing out that AECO industries – which includes water utilities – are both the most excited about and the least concerned with AI’s potential downsides. These leaders undoubtedly see the opportunity to use AI to save water by stopping leaks, optimize pumps to save electricity, utilize generative design time-savers, etc.
In essence, the hype around AI has cooled; now comes the hard part of choosing new AI-based tools and processes and doing the work of implementing them with a long-term plan.
3. The still-widening skills gap (we can’t say we weren’t warned)
Talent remains a perennial issue, with nearly two-thirds of organizations saying they struggle to find the skills they need and that this is hindering their growth. Exacerbating the talent crunch is a growing number of organizations that are letting people go because they lack the right technical skills, further widening their talent gap.
This is an enormous issue, especially for the water industry. With report after report being published – like the recent ASCE 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure and the Black & Veatch “ten-years-later” 2022 report – that implore infrastructure-related industries to devote more attention to filling positions amid the coming wave of retirements. The water industry will be particularly hard hit, with 1.7 million workers expected to retire in the next 10 years. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
The skills gap is especially true of civil infrastructure organizations. This year, 61% of leaders in the sector say the right technical skills are hard to find, up from 28% in 2024 and representing a 118% year-over-year change. Concerns about an aging workforce are compounded by the industry’s difficulty in attracting young talent who see civil engineering as less technologically advanced than other sectors – even if that isn’t necessarily true.
We’ve made this argument before: If you’re a water utility that embraces digital workflows and considers sustainability an important aspect of your work, you should use these facts as selling points to attract young fresh-faced talent. The report upholds this idea, with sustainability experiencing a surge of optimism this time around. Nearly all leaders said that their organizations are taking steps to be more sustainable and they continue to say that sustainability is a key differentiator for them in talent acquisition.
It’s becoming more difficult, and it’s not going to get any less difficult.
On the subject of new recruits, one of the respondents perhaps put it best in her open-ended response: “Recruiting younger generations is a challenge. People don’t think our industry is cool enough,” says Linn Areno, Head of Digital Development at Skanska Sweden. “Personally, it’s quite hard because everyone else is depending on our industry. You don’t have anything if you don’t have roads, if you don’t have houses. Younger generations want to do cool computer stuff.”
She has a point. Personally, we like to think that working on infrastructure is pretty cool – especially if you’re working on sophisticated water simulation and design software (that’s computer stuff!). But there’s no denying that these AECO industries – not least among them water professionals – can do a better job of putting cutting-edge computer tech into the hands of fresh-faced recruits to help realize their organization’s future goals.
There’s so much more in the report
These are just a few of the top insights from Autodesk’s 2025 State of Design & Make report, which is available to read and download at your leisure. The report is beautifully laid out and has a companion website where you can browse through some striking ‘infostat’ illustrations. You’ll notice that you can often sort this data by industry, region, or even smaller subsets. The team who put this report together did an excellent job, and we hope you’ll reward all of their hard work by digging into the data.
No time to dig? Dip into some top-level trends with this short video explainer. 👇