Autodesk, Inc (ADSK) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Autodesk, Inc (NASDAQ: ADSK) Q1 2026 Earnings Call dated May. 22, 2025

Corporate Participants:

Simon Mays-Smith — VP of Investor Relations

Andrew Anagnost — President, CEO & Director

Janesh Moorjani — Executive VP & CFO

Analysts:

Saket Kalia — Analyst

Jay Vleeschhouwer — Analyst

Adam Borg — Analyst

Jason Celino — Analyst

Elizabeth Elliott — Analyst

Bhavin Shah — Analyst

Joseph Vruwink — Analyst

Taylor McGinnis — Analyst

Michael Turrin — Analyst

Sitikantha Panigrahi — Analyst

Hoi-Fung Wong — Analyst

Joshua Tilton — Analyst

Tyler Radke — Analyst

Presentation:

Operator

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Autodesk First Quarter and Full Year Fiscal 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the call over to Simon Mays-Smith, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Simon Mays-Smith — VP of Investor Relations

Thanks, operator, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining our conference call to discuss Autodesk’s fiscal ’26 first quarter results. Andrew Anagnost, our CEO; and Janesh Moorjani, our CFO, are on the line with me.

During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including outlook and related assumptions and on products, go-to-market and strategies. Actual events or results could differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with today’s press release for important risks and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ from those in our forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements made during the call are being made as of today. If this call is replayed or reviewed after today, the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information. Autodesk disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

We will quote several numeric or growth changes during this call as we discuss our financial performance. Unless otherwise noted, each such reference represents a year-on-year comparison. All non-GAAP numbers referenced in today’s call are reconciled in our press release or Excel financials and other supplemental materials available on our Investor Relations website.

And now I will turn the call over to Andrew.

Andrew Anagnost — President, CEO & Director

Thank you, Simon, and welcome, everyone, to the call. Autodesk delivered strong first quarter results. Revenue and non-GAAP earnings per share topped the higher end of our guidance ranges and billings, non-GAAP margins and free cash flow exceeded our expectations.

Two things are clear against an uncertain geopolitical, macroeconomic and policy backdrop. First, our strong momentum and performance in the first quarter of fiscal ’26 set us up well for the year. And second, we continue to make the right decisions to drive long-term shareholder value.

We are focusing our growth investments on our strategic priorities in cloud, platform and AI. We are optimizing our sales and marketing and investing to enable future optimization that drives higher margins. We are allocating more capital to share repurchases as our free cash flow stack rebuilds from the transition to annual billings for most multiyear contracts. And with the appointment of John Cahill, Ram Krishnan, Jeff Epstein and Christie Simons, we are refreshing our Board to guide the next decade of growth.

In this uncertain world, Autodesk has three sources of certainty. First, the new transaction model is a proactive plan to integrate more closely with our customers and drive additional business, while also increasing automation and reducing duplicative workflows with our channel partners. It opens up new growth and margin opportunities for Autodesk.

Second, rebuilding our free cash flow stack after the transition to annual billings for most multiyear contracts increases our capacity to sustainably return cash to shareholders through share repurchases. And third, as we come to the end of those 2 major business model transitions, Autodesk will be easier to analyze and understand.

I will now turn the call over to Janesh to discuss our quarterly financial performance and guidance for fiscal ’26. I’ll then come back to update you on our strategic growth initiatives.

Janesh Moorjani — Executive VP & CFO

Thanks, Andrew. Q1 was another strong quarter. Overall, the underlying momentum of the business was similar to prior quarters. We saw strength in AECO in upfront revenue from Enterprise Business Agreements or EBAs and in the Autodesk store, as friction from the new transaction model implementation process continued to ease. Our go-to-market optimization plan is also on track. Our new Chief Revenue Officer, Andy Elder, joined on May 12 from Microsoft.

Total revenue in the first quarter grew 15% as reported and 16% in constant currency. The contribution from the new transaction model to revenue was $78 million in the first quarter. Total revenue grew 11% in constant currency and excluding the impact of the new transaction model. Please see the tables in our press release, earnings deck, and Excel financials for details by product and region.

Billings increased 29% as reported and 30% in constant currency, reflecting the shift to annual billings for most multi-year contracts and the transition to the new transaction model. The contribution from the new transaction model to billings was $105 million in the first quarter. Billings grew 22% at constant currency and excluding the impact of the new transaction model.

RPO of $7.2 billion and current RPO of $4.6 billion grew 21% and 16%, respectively. Turning to margins. First quarter GAAP and non-GAAP operating margins were 14% and 37%, respectively. GAAP operating margins decreased 7 percentage points, primarily due to restructuring charges of $105 million and a one-time non-cash charge of $54 million reflecting a cumulative adjustment in stock based compensation since fiscal 1999 related to the company’s employee stock purchase program.

The financial impact of this was immaterial in any of our historical reporting periods. For example, it was a total of $4 million in fiscal ’25. There are more details in the earnings deck. This does not affect the trajectory of stock based compensation for future years. We remain very focused on bringing stock based compensation as a percent of revenue to below 10%, and in part to reflect that intent, we have incorporated it into our long term executive incentive plans.

Non-GAAP operating margins were strong, increasing 3 percentage points. This reflected operating leverage from ongoing cost discipline and timing benefits from restructuring, partly offset by the margin drag from the new transaction model. First quarter free cash flow was $556 million.

Moving on to capital allocation, we continue to focus organic investment on our strategic priorities. We purchased approximately 1.3 million shares for $353 million at an average price of approximately $269 per share.

Turning to guidance. I will again speak to the numbers, excluding the impacts of the new transaction model, and in constant currency to give you a clearer view on the underlying dynamics of the business. In the earnings deck, you’ll see that we’ve again split out the impact of the new transaction model and currency movements for our fiscal ’26 guidance.

The underlying momentum of the business in the first quarter of fiscal ’26 was consistent with recent quarters. Since February, the U.S. dollar has depreciated against major currencies, and macroeconomic uncertainty has increased. The increases in our billings, revenue, and free cash flow dollar guidance ranges, therefore, reflect those foreign exchange movements, partly offset by additional caution in our underlying growth assumptions to reflect greater macroeconomic uncertainty.

To give you a feel for what this means when compared to our prior guidance, the lower ends of our new billings and free cash flow ranges assume that new business growth for the rest of the year decelerates at roughly the same rate as during the pandemic and that EBA renewal uplift rates deteriorate.

Our underlying revenue growth guidance is unchanged because its ratable nature makes it less volatile, and our business performance in the first quarter has already incrementally reduced the risk of our guidance for the remainder of the year. So the billings guidance range increases to $7.16 billion to $7.31 billion. The revenue guidance range increases to $6.925 billion to $6.995 billion, and the free cash flow guidance range increases to $2.1 billion to $2.2 billion.

On margins, the revenue tailwind from exchange rate movements is in part balanced by cost headwinds, but we’ve raised the bottom end of our non-GAAP guidance range, reflecting operating leverage and ongoing cost discipline. GAAP earnings per share guidance reflects, in part, the one-time charges taken in the first quarter. We’ve increased our non-GAAP earnings per share guidance reflecting the non-GAAP operating margin increase.

The slide deck on our website has more details on modeling assumptions for the second quarter and full year fiscal ’26. Andrew, back to you.

Andrew Anagnost — President, CEO & Director

Thank you, Janesh. Autodesk is focused on the convergence of Design and Make in the cloud enabled by platform, industry clouds, and AI. Autodesk is at the forefront of convergence because we’ve been evolving and investing in the business models, products, and platforms, and go-to-market to capitalize on it.

Let me give you a few examples from the quarter. In AECO, one of the world’s leading infrastructure consulting firms, closed its sixth EBA with us, the second largest deal in Autodesk’s history. Our partnership is centered around accelerating its transition to BIM, facilitating the adoption of global data standards, and standardizing on Autodesk Construction Cloud as its common data environment for digital delivery.

These initiatives will enable automation to replace low value manual tasks, enhance value added engineering, reduce errors and rework, and establish a framework for leveraging AI. The ultimate goal is to transform its design, and delivery approach, and leverage its scale and expertise to accelerate growth, drive efficiency and improve profitability.

Hitachi Energy provides innovative, sustainable and efficient solutions that support energy transition. As part of the most recent EBA renewal, it expanded adoption of Autodesk Construction Cloud, Revit, and Fusion to advance renewable energy integration and digitization.

Furthermore, Hitachi Energy invested in asset and data driven capabilities and digital twin solutions in creating a digital foundation throughout the product life cycle and various disciplines. This includes enabling predictive maintenance through the real time monitoring and analysis of grid performance.

A leading design build general contractor and existing GCPay and building connected customer began looking for an integrated solution to manage increasing project complexity and drive efficiency. After a thorough evaluation, it selected Autodesk along with a platinum implementation partner to provide specialized implementation and onboarding plans.

By standardizing on Autodesk Construction Cloud, this customer will unify project data and workflows and improve collaboration across design, engineering, and subcontractors. These stories have a common theme, converging people, processes, and data across the project life cycle to increase efficiency and sustainability while decreasing risk.

Our comprehensive end-to-end industry clouds and platform drive convergence and extend our footprint further into larger growth segments like infrastructure and construction. And that is reflected in the continued strong revenue and new customer momentum in construction.

Moving on to manufacturing. We made excellent progress on our strategic initiatives. Customers continue to invest in their digital transformations and consolidate on our Design and Make platform to drive growth and increase resilience. Waldner is a German based industrial group specializing in engineering and system solutions across laboratories, process systems, and filling and ceiling machines. It was looking to transition from 2D to 3D solutions to streamline workflows and accelerate sales cycle times and project delivery.

In Q1, it purchased our product design and manufacturing collection and Vault Professional to supercharge its three design and data management capabilities. Waldner expects to enhance collaboration across stakeholders and efficiently manage design iterations through the project life cycle.

George P. Johnson, which creates immersive brand experiences, partnered with Autodesk for its large scale digital transformation. By breaking down silos and automating workflows, GPJ sought to enhance collaboration, scheduling, capacity planning and shop floor visibility to avoid late stage changes that can result in project delivery and financial risk. The team at GPJ will transition engineering, design, and four fabrication facilities from several disparate legacy applications to Fusion Manage and operations, a modern, consolidated, and connected system.

With Fusion Manage and operations, GPJ will have 3D design tools with integrated process automation powered by a common data environment. Grain Handler is a global leader in grain handling equipment. Historically, it relied on two competitor solutions, one for design and one for manufacturing. Facing growing inefficiencies from limited process integration, Grain Handler selected Fusion to modernize its entire design and manufacturing workflow.

Integrated CAD/CAM capabilities on a unified platform will streamline engineering processes and accelerate production timelines. This story highlights customers’ growing desire for unified workflows and Fusion’s increasing ability to handle complex, high stakes manufacturing processes in multi-seat environments.

Converge data opens up new opportunities for Autodesk. As customers seek to drive efficient innovation, Fusion is driving strong ACV growth with extension attach rates increasing and driving average sales prices higher, and we’re delivering meaningful productivity gains to customers where we deploy AI. I talked about our AI powered AutoConstrain last quarter. This feature has created over 580,000 constraints for our Fusion users since launch by automating the critical but laborious task of defining sketch geometry. This is a task that is foundational to 3D model generation.

Since last quarter, user acceptance rates of AutoConstrain command have increased to more than 50% through our continual AI improvement and UX enhancements. This is indicative of the potential of Autodesk AI as it continually improves our users’ experience with Fusion.

In education, Austin University is preparing future engineers to drive innovation through next-generation design, analysis, and manufacturing by making the entire Autodesk product portfolio available to all students.

Additionally, it is migrating to Fusion for first year modules in all engineering related disciplines, providing a modern platform to foster collaboration and hands on learning and equip the next generation of engineers and designers with industry relevant skills.

And lastly, we continue to find new ways for our customers to consume our products and services in ways that work best for them. For example, we helped a major engineering consulting company in Taiwan remove non-compliant versions of our software and add the necessary licenses to ensure access to the latest and safest software for all its employees.

And we enabled Flex Consumption for Jones Engineering, a global contractor, so they can manage fluctuating project requirements in their cutting edge offsite fabrication and moduling — modular manufacturing business. This enabled rapid scaling of new projects and reduced administrative bottlenecks.

Attractive long term secular growth markets, our focused strategy delivering ever more valuable and connected solutions to our customers, and a resilient business are generating strong and sustained momentum, both in absolute terms and relative to peers.

Our disciplined execution is driving greater operational velocity and efficiency. We are deploying capital to grow the business, further reduce our share count, and enhance value creation over time. In combination, we believe these factors will deliver sustainable shareholder value over many years.

Let me finish with a story. On January 7, wildfires started in Los Angeles in the Eaton Canyon and Pacific Palisades. Driven by hurricane force winds, the fires burned over 57,000 acres. They displaced over 200,000 residents and tragically took the lives of at least 30 people. More than 16,000 structures were lost, with economic damage estimated at over $250 billion.

I grew up in Southern California, and I lived through major earthquakes and other natural disasters, but the scale and scope of the devastation of this fire makes my heart ache for the people that still live in my childhood home. But in the spirit of resilience that defines our country, civic leaders and the community are working together in new ways to rapidly rebuild the city and rebuild it to be more resilient.

For example, The Foothill Catalog Foundation formed by volunteer architects and supported by Autodesk is creating a pre-approved catalog of home designs that will lower costs, reduce permitting delays that can stretch over a year, and accelerate reconstruction. Hundreds of architects have already signed on.

We’ve seen the power of approaches like this before. In Singapore, Autodesk supported the government’s CORENET X initiative, allowing teams to collaborate in a single digital model, detect issues early, and streamline approvals across agencies. The result, faster, more coordinated building processes that reduce waste and delays.

We strongly support similar initiatives now being proposed at the federal level here in the U.S. We are not only doing this because there isn’t enough labor, money, or materials to build and rebuild everything that is needed to support our rapidly changing future, but also because this is how we unlock the full potential of communities. This is how we help Los Angeles remain, in every sense, the City of Angels.

Operator, we would now like to open the call up for questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Saket Kalia of Barclays. Please go ahead, Saket.

Saket Kalia

Okay. Great. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here, and a nice start to the year.

Janesh Moorjani

Thank you.

Saket Kalia

Andrew, maybe to start with you. You mentioned in your prepared remarks that the underlying momentum in the business has been stable. Just given the significant uncertainty out there, could you just talk about how customer conversations are evolving, if at all? And maybe just touch on just broadly your thoughts on the macro, given how much time you spend with customers?

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. Saket, a pleasure. Thanks for asking this question. All right. Obviously, trade policy uncertainty, all these things, these have material impacts on our customers. It increases the costs of goods that they secure through the supply chain, their material costs that creates uncertainty in their bidding processes. And this is true for a wide variety of customers.

So when I’m talking to customers, they’re absolutely flagging this uncertainty right now. There’s no doubt, it’s creating concern for them. But when they flag it, they talk a lot more about the second half of the year than they talk about things right now. And to kind of put this in perspective and connect it back to some things Janesh said in the opening commentary, construction backlog ticked up in the quarter.

We continue to see increases in monthly active users of our products. We saw increasing bid activity on Bid Board. And most of our customers continue to see an inflow of business. So net-net of all of this is that just like us, they’re feeling uncertainty, but they’re not seeing it right now in our business — in their business, just like we’re not seeing it right now in our business.

Saket Kalia

Got it. That’s super helpful. Janesh, maybe for you. Q1 margins here were better than we expected, and it was great to see the margin guide go up for the year. Could you just talk about your margin momentum a little bit? And maybe in particular, can you just talk about how the sales and marketing optimization plan is going generally?

Janesh Moorjani

Thanks, Saket. Happy to talk about that. So the team executed really well here in Q1, and we are very pleased with the strong performance on both revenue and on non-GAAP operating margins. The Q1 margin strength mainly was driven by the revenue outperformance, combined with just ongoing expense discipline that we have here and the team.

On the restructuring, we executed that well. As you’ll recall, we’re on a multi-year journey with the implementation of the new transaction model and deriving the benefits from that. And so the restructuring reflected the initiation of the go-to-market optimization, and we are building the capabilities now that we will need next year as we continue our sales and marketing evolution. So far, I’d say, we are on track with the overall sales and marketing optimization plan for the year. And overall, we are very well set up for Q2 and the rest of the year.

Saket Kalia

Very helpful. Thanks, guys.

Janesh Moorjani

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jay Vleeschhouwer of Griffin Securities. Please go ahead, Jay.

Jay Vleeschhouwer

Thank you. Good evening. Andrew, starting with you, you spoke of the role of your products comprehensiveness, product convergence, which of course has been a theme for you and the industry for some time. With that in mind, and also recalling something you spoke on the Q4 call.

You mentioned on that call that you were accelerating some of the roadmaps associated with your industry clouds. And perhaps you can elaborate on that, what are you doing? What have you been doing in terms of accelerating some of the development and perhaps GA of certain technologies, including, in particular, perhaps the work you’re doing to integrate ACC with Forma? And then a follow-up question.

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. So let me highlight on some of those things, all right. First, let me talk about the things we’re accelerating in Fusion, which I think are really kind of anchored in some of the strong success we saw with Fusion in the quarter. We’re accelerating the roadmap around data management issues. This comes straight from our customers. They want better BOM management, they want better product data management in the cloud with granular data from Fusion. So we have worked hard to reallocate funds and focus on these customer priorities. As a result, we have accelerated the roadmap. We saw some things come out in Q1 that are relevant to these problems. You’ll see more things coming out throughout the year, and they’re an important part of driving multi-seat deals for Fusion.

Now, when you look at the roadmap for Forma, I don’t want to get ahead of some of the things that will be talked about at AU, but there’s areas, of course, that our customers are really interested in. One of the big areas is they definitely want to be able to collaborate better across multi-disciplines and they want to use kind of Forma as the center of that collaboration activity. So in order to facilitate some of that, look for us to be accelerating some of the things that connect Forma deeply to Revit and other tools that are relevant to the entire disciplinary process, similar to some things we’ve done in the past and look for us to kind of dial-up the presence of Forma Board, which is a great collaboration tool and idea collaboration tool for multi-disciplinary teams and see some of those things get a little bit more emphasis on some of the roadmap work as well as, of course, the AI features that we’re definitely focused on and have been focused on for some time.

Jay Vleeschhouwer

Okay. As a follow-up, we spoke, of course, tonight again about the go-to-market changes, the model changes, and so forth. One of the things that seems to be happening in parallel and maybe even accelerated by the changes you’ve been making is channel consolidation, particularly here in the U.S. We’ve seen it among some of your peers, but we’ve certainly seen it in your case, where you now have half as many named entities with whom you count as partners as a decade ago. So the question is, what do you see as the benefits of such consolidation or perhaps the risks of any of that consolidation in your channel?

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. So this is something that we’ve been deliberately encouraging and driving through a lot of processes and engagements with our channel partners. We want fewer, more solution-focused channel partners out there, and we want, I mean, more, sorry, more, and we want fewer transactionally focused channel partners out there in our ecosystem.

So as a result, what you’re seeing is our larger partners are more solutions focused partners, our partners that focus on their own IP are buying up some of the smaller gold and silver partners. And also frankly, what you’re seeing is some of the non-contracted partners and silver partners lower down in the ecosystem kind of disappearing. And we believe that that’s advantageous to our business, and it’s absolutely the Flow should do in terms of the evolution we’re having.

Now, when you look at some of the benefits associated with this, we actually saw some of these in Q1. We saw some fairly robust activity on the store, and the store grew quite nicely, and most of this activity was focused in — on increased price realization. And that is a result of us capturing business down market that would have gone to transactionally focused partners in the past. That’s great. We want to see those customers come closer to us, and that’s exactly what we saw in Q1. We’re catching up based on some of the impacts of the new transaction model. I expect some of that to continue. How much of it continues moving forward is something that we just have to wait and see. But that’s one of the clear benefits.

The downside, of course, whenever you concentrate your partners, you want your partners to stay focused on the things that are important. Fortunately, we’ve corrected for that because we have some control of the commissions in terms of the things that we incent. We want our partners to not only focus on renewals, but we want them to focus on new business as well. And that’s a risk we’re aware of and that we correct for with the way we compensate them.

Jay Vleeschhouwer

Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Janesh.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Adam Borg of Stifel. Please go ahead, Adam.

Adam Borg

Awesome. And thanks so much for taking the questions. Andrew, maybe for you, and building off of Jay’s question on the channel. Last quarter, you talked a little bit about the transaction model, and I’d call it some self-inflicted hiccups, as they were focusing on that as opposed to the business itself. Just curious, kind of how that’s progressing in general? And is there an opportunity for this to become a tailwind as the business — as the channel partners continue to focus on the new business growth you just talked about?

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. Thank you for the question, Adam. So first off, we’re definitely not seeing the kind of disruptions we saw last year and in Q4 associated with channel productivity. The channel partners are still working through adapting and onboarding their long tail of customers onto the new transaction model, but we’re not dealing with the kind of systems requests or process realignments that we saw earlier in last year and towards the end of last year. So that’s a really good thing.

So what you should expect is that channel productivity should increase as we head out into the year, and you’ll actually start to see channel partners kind of move beyond just onboarding existing customers and into kind of extending their renewal activities and extending into their new business growth activities. So we’re looking forward to that, and we think it’s a likely outcome of the current phase that we’re in.

Janesh Moorjani

Adam, I might just add on that, that for some of our channel partners, the first renewals that they’ll have on the new model in the Americas will be in June and in EMEA, it will be in September, just given that that’s when those regions went live on the new model last year. But as Andrew was saying, so far so good, and it’s — over time, we will continue to focus on how we can deliver more valuable and data driven, and connected products and services to our customers.

Adam Borg

Well, that’s incredibly helpful. Maybe just as a quick follow-up, Janesh. I think just on NRR, this is the first time it was above the 100% to 110% range, I think in years. You talked about some of that benefit coming from the new transaction model. I guess, I just wanted to confirm it would have been within that range, not below the range without the transaction model? And why should we think it should be at the 110 range for the rest of the year? Thanks so much.

Janesh Moorjani

Yeah, Adam. That’s right. It’s mainly the mechanical effects of the new transaction model. It’s hard to disaggregate the specific percentage, but it’s safe to say that, excluding that effect, it would have been consistent with where it was previously and within the 100% to 110% — 100% to 110% range.

Adam Borg

Excellent. Thanks so much.

Janesh Moorjani

Yeah.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Celino of KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your question please, Jason.

Jason Celino

Hey. Good afternoon, and thank you. One question on kind of the numbers. So if we look at the Q1, call it, revenue constant currency adjusted for the new model transition, that growth was 11%. Exiting last quarter, like-for-like, this metric was up 9%. So it actually accelerated a little bit. Maybe can you just speak to like what drove that uptick? And then I’ll have a follow-up.

Janesh Moorjani

Yeah, I’m happy to. So Q1, we saw strength across the quarter. In Q1, we are obviously very pleased with the outcome that we had. I mentioned some of the drivers earlier in the prepared remarks, where some of the strength came in the quarter from AEC, a little bit more from the upfront revenue from EBAs, and also from the Autodesk store, some of the friction from the new transactional model implementation continued to ease. So all of those were the drivers.

And fundamentally, our businesses has been very resilient and it’s been like that over the past couple of years because we are diversified across various industries and geographies, and segments. One of the things I will point out for Q1 in particular is Q1 was an easier comp, just given the timing of acquisitions that we had during fiscal ’25. Most of our revenue from acquisitions last year came in Q2 to Q4. So that’s about a 1 percentage point impact there. But fundamentally, even if you consider adjusting for that, it was still strong performance overall.

Jason Celino

Okay. And then keeping on this logic, when we look at the full year guidance, 8% to 9% on a normalized FX neutral basis. Can you just remind us what you built in from, like an extra cushion perspective? I think last time you talked about the go-to-market realignment and new sales leadership. But was there any cushion built in for macro, or are there those assumptions changed after these 90 days? Thank you.

Janesh Moorjani

Yeah. No assumption changes with respect to our core underlying business. When we initiated guidance for the year back in February, we had been quite transparent that we had not seen anything in the business at the time, and we had assumed that the macroeconomic environment at that time would stay unchanged. So, fast forward to May, the only two changes are that we’ve seen the U.S. dollar weaken, and that’s currency benefits that we passed along in the guide. And we do see greater macroeconomic uncertainty there, which we have now factored into the forecast. And I spelt out some of the assumptions earlier in the prepared remarks.

So those are the only two broad assumption changes. If I think about what that means from the standpoint of revenue growth, particularly in the back half of the year, the slower growth in revenue in the second half is mainly a function of these guidance assumptions that we’ve used. As we said, we haven’t actually seen that impact yet in the business, but we are prepared for it, and we just think it’s prudent to factor that in.

Jason Celino

Perfect. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Elizabeth Porter of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Elliott

Great. Thank you so much. I wanted to follow up on some of the AI comments around AutoConstrain usage. I think it’s great to hear the usage and acceptance rates increase. So, looking ahead, are there any particular areas where you see the biggest opportunity to launch more AI functionality?

How should we think about the pace of deployments? And understanding it’s still really early, what could this mean for an opportunity to improve upsells or start to use the price lever a little bit more, just given you could be driving a lot more innovation in the portfolio? Thank you.

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. Thanks for that, Elizabeth. So first off, let’s just restate our philosophy here. We’re very interested in delivering highly specific AI enhancements that drive real productivity gains for our customers, things that attack problems or challenges that our customers have that are either deeply repetitive or time consuming, and that we can kind of point them to and solve the problem for them.

The AutoConstrain feature is a great example of that. What we’re doing with drawing automation is another great example of that. You should look for us to continue to roll out features like that. Now, these are pretty intelligent features. Remember, these are built off of our own foundation models. These are models that actually understand a sketch, so to speak, and they understand geometry. Look for us to continue to roll out increasingly sophisticated tools that kind of take away some of this grunt work from the customers and allow them to be more productive with the tools they have. And there will be long term opportunities for us. One, in Fusion land, we intend to make Fusion the most AI powered tool out there in the mechanical design market.

That is going to be a clear example — advantage for us as we move to continue to displace competitors. And currently, we’re gaining market share right now. We look to accelerate that with AI, primarily as one of the key tools. Now, as you look into AEC land, you’re going to see more tools specifically coming out in Forma that actually enhance Forma’s already existing AI capabilities. You’ll see some interesting things coming out there. Again, targeted at some of these repeating — reputable processes. Eventually, this will also translate into new opportunities.

There’s two ways that Forma is increasing capabilities translate into opportunity. One is that it makes it easier to take sophisticated 3D down market. Two, ultimately, it will make the total solution more powerful. And at some point, we will be able to recover price like that, but it’s still early days. Let us deliver some of the value, and the customers recognize that, and then we’ll be able to kind of explore the deeper implications in terms of revenue uplift.

Elizabeth Elliott

Great. Thank you very much. And then just as a quick follow-up. I believe last quarter the — there was a reference about possible disruption from the restructuring plans in the CRO transition, which was prudently included in guidance. It sounds like it’s been minimal disruption thus far, but could you just provide a little bit more color on what you’re seeing? And is there any point in the year where you feel like we would be getting more comfortable, that these risks are behind us? Thanks.

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. Look, I’ll take that, and Janesh can add anything if he wants to add anything. Look, obviously, we undertook a fairly major restructure in the first quarter. We had mitigation plans. We had other things associated to around that to make sure that we kind of manage the disruption.

We did factor some disruption in, and there, of course, there was disruption associated with such a large action like that, but we also had some other aspects of the business that showed improvement. The store was another great example of where we saw improvement. We saw improvement in upfront revenue. So there was some offsetting momentum in the business as well that helped us get through some of these things.

As you look through it, we already have our new CRO in pro — in place. The acting CRO was one of our team, Elisabeth Zornes on our team. So she was the acting CRO. She’s here to bridge the new CRO over. While we’re not kind of through the total knot hole on getting through all these things, we feel like we have this under control and that we’ve kind of accounted for the risks associated with that. Janesh, do you want to add anything?

Janesh Moorjani

No. I think, Andrew, that you summarized nicely.

Elizabeth Elliott

Great. Thank you.

Janesh Moorjani

Thanks, Elizabeth.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Bhavin Shah of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead, Bhavin.

Bhavin Shah

Great. Thanks for taking my questions, and congrats on the strong start to the year. Janesh, just one clarification for you on the guidance. It sounds like you’re embedding incremental prudence just in terms of the macro. And just clarifying that you’re not seeing anything yet in the business that’s cautioning this. It’s more of the headline and the customer conversations that you’re having that’s enabling you to do this, or is there something that you’re seeing today?

Janesh Moorjani

No, you’re exactly right, Bhavin. We haven’t actually seen anything. We saw good momentum in the business in Q1 that’s continued into Q2 so far. We feel good about where we stand, but it’s just being prudent about what we are hearing and seeing out there.

Bhavin Shah

That’s helpful there. And then, Andrew, just one for you. I know in the past, you’ve talked about this and we pick it up in our conversation as well that the industry continues to be labor constrained. When you speak to customers, is this still a challenge for them? How long do you think that persists? And how do you think AI might be able to solve this? And how do you think you can capture that?

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. Look, we’re pretty consistent that there’s not enough labor, materials and capital to build and rebuild everything that needs to be rebuilt. Our industry desperately needs digital efficiency. This isn’t going away. I think the current climate might actually exasperate some of these labor constraints as well.

The good news is we sell on — we sell certainty in uncertain times. We sell tools that allow people to digitize the process, allow them to do more with the resources they have. This, frankly, in my opinion, is one of the reasons why we’re seeing robust adoption of our expanded Design and Make portfolio is because we’re actually delivering them the kind of productivity they need in a labor constrained market.

Those constraints are going to be persistent. I actually think in terms of impact on our business, it’s positive for us because it continues to force industries like AEC to look at technology as a big — is a big productivity lever for them. They need technology now. They realize that. They’re way behind relative to manufacturing, and this is their opportunity and their moment to start embracing technology to increase that productivity and deal with these fundamental capacity constraints.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Joe Vruwink of Baird. Please go ahead, Joe.

Joseph Vruwink

Hi, great. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to ask now that Andy and the new Revenue Officer is in place, just the search for the next individual there, some of the skill sets you are looking for and particularly that Andy is going to have a lot of new things he can undertake just with Autodesk more of a in controlled direct sales organization and some of the opportunities you’re thinking about going forward and Andy is going to be tasked to lead?

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. So Andy came to us from Microsoft. He brings a background with really strong enterprise sales skills, all right, which is really important because increasingly, we’re getting into end-to-end solutions with our customers. We’re going deeper into their businesses. We’re a much more strategic partner in a lot of customer accounts. We — it’s good to have leadership that gets that, that understands that.

He’s got a lot of deep cloud knowledge, cloud native kind of expertise with regards to selling solutions that are cloud enabled end-to-end solutions. So, he’s basically rounding out our skill set with kind of the skills that we need moving forward into the next chapter of Autodesk history. So we’re excited that he’s joined, and we’re looking forward to him having an impact.

Joseph Vruwink

Okay. That’s great. And then I wanted to ask about AI again. Andrew, you touched on a lot of the initial Autodesk focus is targeting things that are applicable to repeatable processes and customer workflows, which I’d imagine doing that, customers see the ROI very quickly. I’m more interested in maybe the future use cases and when you scan what’s happening in kind of the start-up community around text to CAD or scan to CAD, are some of these capabilities and I know Project Bernini is focused on some of this stuff, but when you think about the future CAD uses, is Autodesk doing what it needs to be positioned when those prove valuable?

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. We are absolutely doing what needs to be positioned. I will, in some ways, defer you to Autodesk University for this year, okay, not to get ahead of some of the announcements, but we are building very powerful tools that will allow people to generate different types of geometry in significantly simpler ways. Now I consider these both next-gen and both massive productivity enhancers. Yes, obviously, we are looking at highly disruptive things that actually dramatically change the workflows. We not only are doing some of these things organically, but we watch some of these companies externally as well.

To give you a good example, in one of the most highly disruptive industries that we have, media and entertainment, look at what we’re doing with Wonder Studio, which is now Flow Studio. It’s a highly disruptive direct to special effect video and video environment that allows people to create scenes, create character animations, overlays, and things in a very generative way, highly different workflow than what our customers do in their current environments. We’re doing things like that as well in our other industries. It’s just the rate and pace is different.

Joseph Vruwink

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Taylor McGinnis of UBS. Please go ahead, Taylor.

Taylor McGinnis

Hi. Thanks so much for taking my question. Just maybe on the operating income margin guide. So I think the commentary last quarter was that most of the expansion this year was really coming from operating efficiencies and scale, and that like a good portion of the savings from the RIF were being reinvested back into the business.

So, just how are you thinking about the reinvestment of those savings today? Have your views at all changed? And then you mentioned — you’ve mentioned in the past opportunity to scale back on some redundant spend. So just where are — what inning are we in that? And are there more opportunities for that as we move throughout the year? Thanks.

Janesh Moorjani

Taylor, this is Janesh. I’ll take that. So far, we’re on track for the plan that we had laid out for fiscal ’26. When we did the restructuring, we said that we were going to reinvest a portion of the savings from the restructuring and building the capabilities that we know that we will need for the next body of work that we need to do on the sales and marketing side in particular, particularly as we think about building tighter integrations with our partners and continuing to scale as we build out the self-serve motion. So those are all on track. And the overall spend plan for the year largely stays unchanged.

You’ll see that with the strong performance that we had on revenue in Q1, that outperformance largely went to the bottom line, and we’ve generally kept our full year spending outlook unchanged compared to the prior outlook. So we continue to expect that our spend in constant currency, holding aside the new transaction model, will be right around the 4% mark in terms of year-over-year growth compared to ’25. And just by way of comparison, in fiscal ’25, that number was 7% over fiscal ’24. So we’ve definitely baked that in into the underlying business, and that’s a big source of the op margin expansion that we laid out at the start of this year.

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. And reinforce that just a little bit, Taylor, we’re on a multi-year journey to driving productivity enhancements in our sales and marketing organization. We’re working on systems and processes, like Janesh said, that lead to future and ongoing optimizations that will turn into productivity and ultimately turn into margin growth. So this is not a one and done kind of situation. This is an ongoing kind of effort within the company.

Taylor McGinnis

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Turrin of Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead, Michael.

Michael Turrin

Hey, great. I appreciate you taking the questions and all the commentary throughout the call. I was just curious if you’d be able to compare and contrast what you’re seeing across geos at all. We can see the currency impacts, but just wondering, it doesn’t sound like there’s anything overly specific you’re highlighting, but if there’s any difference in terms of momentum or activity you’re seeing across certain regions versus what you were maybe expecting starting the year?

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. Generally, broadly speaking, we’re seeing the kind of momentum we expected. I think one area where you might have seen a little bit more softness was in Asia Pacific. And I just — I’ll just kind of help you understand what’s going on there. One, Japan, remember, was the last on the new transaction model. So Japan is still absorbing some of the impacts in the new transaction model. They’re still going through some of the ramp up.

And you see some of that impacts in our Asia Pacific growth. But also, China and Korea are much more exposed to the macroeconomic turmoil, and some of the trade discussions that are going on right now. So a little bit more softness there. But generally speaking, some of those things were expected, especially with Japan, and that’s kind of the only differences that stand out relative to the rest of the business.

Michael Turrin

Very helpful. And just as a follow on for Janesh. I think a relatively clean start to the year despite the uncertainty would be maybe useful to just get an update around your early observations as Autodesk’s CFO, if there’s anything you’d highlight for investors in terms of your philosophy and framing targets, how you’d assess the gross margin trade off in different scenarios as the year plays out? I think just the framework there is certainly helpful. Thank you.

Janesh Moorjani

Yeah. Happy to do that. Fundamentally, nothing different than my first few months when I was in the job and I provided a view on that on the last call. I continue to see the opportunity for us to address a rich market opportunity ahead and to capture that growth. We’ve talked at length about the product opportunity with respect to industry clouds and platform, and AI.

We’re excited about that and focused on helping the team support growth in the future as well as driving strong operational focus and driving operational margin expansion — operating margin expansion, there’s opportunity for that as well. So, no real change. In terms of our core guidance philosophy, nothing has changed there either. The underlying momentum of the business continues, and we’re off to a great start here in Q1.

Michael Turrin

Very helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Siti Panigrahi of Mizuho. Please go ahead, Siti.

Sitikantha Panigrahi

Thank you, and congrats on a good quarter and especially, Janesh, this is your first full quarter as a CFO, nice quarter.

Janesh Moorjani

Thanks, Siti.

Sitikantha Panigrahi

So my question is, just wanted to understand the linearity that you saw in the quarter, mainly given all the uncertainty we saw tariff, immigration, all that. And wondering what kind of momentum also you’re seeing in May as well? And lot of things in your — you also kind of raised price as well. Love to hear your thoughts on that.

Janesh Moorjani

Yes, Siti. Happy to talk about that. There weren’t really any meaningful trends that we would call out during the quarter. I think it was strong and consistent throughout. We were off to a great start in February and that momentum continued in March as well as in April. And that momentum has continued so far into the month of May as well as I mentioned. It’s obviously too early to say anything more specific on Q2, but I will say that we are confident in our guidance.

Sitikantha Panigrahi

Okay. And then going back to this model transition and one of the benefit of that is cross sell opportunity. Should we think about the cross sell more on the second renewal time when your direct sales engaged there, or have you started seeing some kind of benefit as you are transitioning customers to the new transaction model?

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. Siti, I think the best way to think about that is the cross sell and upsell automations that we’re going to be driving. They’re more longer term things, right. They’re not going to be tied to any specific renewal cycle. So look for those as something that kind of like gets built into our business cadence and allows us to kind of more easily grab — we can actually do these things off cycle in the future. The systems will be able to support customers adding additional capabilities or moving to Flex in the middle of a cycle.

So it’s something that will be dynamically introduced into our business, not tied to any individual renewal event or events like that in the future. So that’s part and parcel of the investments we’re making in some of the additional systems upgrades and systems work. It allows us to kind of do some of these more dynamic adjustments throughout the customer’s life cycle.

Sitikantha Panigrahi

Thanks for that color, Andrew.

Andrew Anagnost

You’re welcome.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ken Wong of Oppenheimer & Company. Please go ahead, Ken.

Hoi-Fung Wong

Fantastic. I just wanted to build on Taylor’s question about the go-to-market transition and kind of the cost coming out of the P&L. We saw a big downtick in duplicative costs after you guys moved all of your partners over across the regions. Is there another goalpost that we should think — we should be thinking about that sees another big swatch of expense coming out? Would that be getting everyone across on the first renewal, or anything you guys could spotlight that we should be thinking about or looking for?

Janesh Moorjani

I think it’s too early to talk about the — what the specifics of the ongoing sales and marketing optimization at this stage. The work that we need to do is to continue to build the capabilities to enable the future of the sales and marketing optimization. Some of the elimination of the duplicative costs that you touched on, I think, once we move forward with the capabilities that we need to enable, I think that will then unlock more opportunity for us. So we will spell all of that out in a little bit more detail at a later point in time.

Hoi-Fung Wong

Okay. Got it. And then just wanted to touch on the billings guide. And you guys did downtick slightly for the constant currency adjusted for — I mean, adjusted for currency and transaction model. Just wondering what was the — what did you guys run into from a headwind perspective that impacted the transaction model piece of that guide?

Janesh Moorjani

So there’s no particular headwind that we ran into. In fact, if anything, the greater impact of the new transaction model suggests that the transaction — new transaction model is actually working well and customers are migrating nicely onto the — onto the direct model. So if anything, that’s actually a positive sign for us in the business, and that we’re executing that part of the model well.

Hoi-Fung Wong

Okay. Perfect. Thanks a lot, guys.

Janesh Moorjani

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Josh Tilton of Wolfe Research. Please go ahead, Josh.

Joshua Tilton

Hey, guys. Thanks for sneaking me in here. And again, I don’t mean to beat the dead horse, but maybe just following up on that last question. The billings guidance on a constant currency basis seems to be reiterated on a constant currency adjusted for the new transaction model, it seems to be down. Can you just walk us through the mechanics on how one of those is reiterated and one of those is now cut?

Janesh Moorjani

Yeah. Happy to do that. And maybe the best way to think about that is if you think about the core underlying business in constant currency terms and excluding the impact of the new transaction model, that we’ve now guided to grow at 16% to 18%, and that reflects the additional macroeconomic uncertainty that we factored in. That’s obviously constant currency, so it doesn’t include any currency benefits.

It only reflects the additional macroeconomic uncertainty that we factored in quite discretely into the forecast, which we had not done back in February. So that explains that delta, and I’ll just reiterate that we’ve not actually seen any impact in the business just yet. We didn’t see anything in Q1, haven’t seen anything in May just yet. And so that’s just prudence on our part.

The other piece, then, is the impact of the new transaction model itself, and we are seeing a greater tailwind from that because we are seeing greater adoption of the new transaction model. So that is actually giving us a greater tailwind mechanically to the billings number. And that’s why that impact increased by 1 percentage point, which gets you back to the same constant currency growth rate that we had, including the new transaction model back in February.

Joshua Tilton

Okay. And then maybe just as my follow-up, I think in the prepared remarks, it was mentioned that you were seeing most of the multi-year deals renew as annual. I guess, is that surprising to you? Is that in line with your expectations? Maybe could just give us some color on why previous customers who chose to lock in for longer are now choosing to only go with annual deals.

Janesh Moorjani

Yeah. That’s not something that we’ve actually seen. We didn’t specifically say anything to that effect in the prepared remarks. I think what we’ve just generally continued to see is the we’re now in sort of the final stages of the billings transition, where you’re starting to see the annual billing stack rebuild from the from the transition that we went through where we converted most customers from annual — from a fully prepaid contracts to annual billings.

Joshua Tilton

It makes sense. Thank you.

Janesh Moorjani

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tyler Radke of Citi. Please go ahead, Tyler.

Tyler Radke

Hey, Janesh. Hey, Andrew. Thanks for taking the question here. I wanted to ask you about the EBAs. Janesh, I think you talked about some higher than expected upfront revenue in the quarter or at least pointed to that as a source of outperformance. So did the EBA timing land a little bit different than you expected? And just given the conversations you’re having with other EBA customers, how are those expansions tracking, or trending relative to what you’ve seen typically?

Janesh Moorjani

Yeah, Tyler, great question, and great to talk to you again. So, on the upfront revenue, that was one of the contributing factors. It was not outsized. It was just one of several factors that helped the overall revenue number in the quarter. We also saw strong billings linearity in the quarter. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, we saw consistent performance across February, March, and April, and that billings linearity also helped us a little bit from the standpoint of the ratable revenue recognition that we get in the quarter. So we saw strength universally across the three months.

In terms of what we’re seeing with respect to how customers are thinking about their renewals and uplift on EBAs. Again, so far, we haven’t seen anything in terms of either renewal rates or in terms of the uplift associated with that. There’s always an occasional contract here or there that might be an outlier, but fundamentally, the momentum that we’ve seen in the business has continued. And we’ve just factored some prudence in associated with that as we’ve built the guide in case that deteriorates in the future, but we haven’t seen that yet.

Tyler Radke

Okay. Helpful explanation. And if I could ask a follow-up, just on pricing philosophy. So certainly, this is well before your time, Janesh, and probably dating back to Andrew when you took the reins, but the beginning of the subscription transition, you offered kind of annual price locks for a lot of customers to migrate them over for maintenance. I think it was capped around 3% to 4%. And over the call, the last decade or so, you have delivered a lot of innovation to the platform, not to mention what you’re doing on the AI side. So, how are you thinking about the uplift or the pricing philosophy as those customers come up for renewal, and you kind of get them back to standard pricing over time?

Andrew Anagnost

Yeah. So that’s the customer that we call the maintenance to subscription cohort. They were actually given 10 year kind of visibility to price increases and price changes in their plan. That program will sunset in the next foreseeable future, you can do the math in terms of 10 years from when the subscription transition began. Ultimately, we will give price increases to that cohort that are consistent with the value we deliver, but it’s just too early to talk about that. But again, that program hasn’t fully sunsetted yet, but it will out there in the future, in the near future.

Tyler Radke

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. That is all the time we have for Q&A today. I would now like to turn the conference back to Simon Mays-Smith for closing remarks. Sir?

Simon Mays-Smith

Thank you, Latif, and thanks, everyone, for joining. We look forward to seeing many of you over the coming days, weeks, and months on the road. If you have any questions in the meantime, please just ping me or the team, be happy to chat. Otherwise, we’ll catch up on Q2 conference call. See you then.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]