The reason why it’s so late is a mixed of: very busy life but also because I was fairly sick the week after AU. Past year I notch the bullet but this year I got a bad bug that took 2 weeks to knock out of my system.
Again, as past year, acknowledge that I do work for Autodesk, so this personal recap is highly subjective. This year we went back to Vegas baby; Vegas is an odd one to describe for me as a location: is it Vegas a place that I would go for holidays? Probably not unless I wanted to do a climbing trip. But do I think that Vegas is a great AU host? I do. I am always so impressed on how is possible to host over 10.000 attendees in one venue, and on top of that as a city they were hosting F1 and all their fans, so felt very smooth for the circumstances.
I started my trip like past year, with my friend and Autodesk colleague Ian Lloyd. He works in a customer facing role focus infrastructure customers, but we have been friends now for a decade. We travel together to the event to make that long journey more amicable and also, we like to play a game on the plane of: who is going to AU? This year the flight we were on was AU folks and F1 folks, and the way to differentiate them was that the F1 folks wear Pirelli, Red Bull, Williams, etc gear. Easy. I bet many people on that plane were confused of why everyone knew each other.
AU is one of the times of the years that I get to see a big part of my Tandem team in person. It is also the time of the year where I get the chance to talk with a big number of customers at once. This means AU is an extreme social and busy week. This year was no different, I believe from 7.00am that I will be in the conference centre until late in the night, when I will finish dinner with colleagues or BIMies alike, will be nonstop of good conversations. Tandem host two customer workshops focusing on project handover which were very successful, and we heard lots from our customers on their challenges and needs. What it is always surprising for me is how different is our industry based on geography and size, and how much workflows change depending on those. Then I have multiple catch ups with industry folks and as past year, I barely made it to the proper classes that I wanted to attend.
Tandem was presenting some major features this AU, some that I have worked tirelessly during the last year, I was particularly excited about Systems and Systems tracing, a tool that allows our users to automatically create system connections in services in their buildings, when data is not great; and after that allows for tracing paths from one element to another, allowing users to find key assets quickly. We also had many customers talking about their journeys, and I always think that is more excited to hear customers talking about the product than the product folks, so it was great to start to see Tandem mature into that chapter.
From the classes that I attended one of my highlights was a panel about sustainability host by Marta Bouchard, where customers talk about the challenges, they are facing to adapt to new policies on sustainability requirements. The panel was made up of mainly Danish firms which is pretty normal, as Scandinavian countries are at the fore front of the journey. Jens Majdal from BIG and Jan Staushold Bundgarrd from C.F. Moller were part of the panel among others. The panellist described how technology is helping them to deliver some of these new calculations but equally how these task, more and more, are evolving and they are having to adapt to it.
The expo hall was also fantastic this year, and I always like to visit companies that I have been following for a while and also discover new ones. Great to see the team from KOPE again there and Modelical. Visit the Autodesk Research stand and see what they are up to, and discover new companies like Slantis, which for me had the best stand of all with all the impressive yellow cubes.
And then the week past like too fast too furious, too quickly, almost at the speed of light, and I was back in the Virgin Atlantic seat, watching blockbuster movies and trying to sleep. It was unfortunate that we landed at peak time traffic and took almost two hours to get from Heathrow to where I live in East London. As mentioned, the week after AU I was very sick. It was not covid, or so the test said. I think it was a mixed between lack of sleep, lots of aircon around and moving away from my very neat routine that prompted this. But nonetheless this was another great AU were I learnt lots from our customers and enjoy my time there! Looking forward to the next one.
P.S.: yes, once again as following my AU2022 tradition, Seinfeld and gifs are part of the recap.
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