HANS KWIOTEK
Andrew Anagnost, Autodesk President and CEO.
On the eve of Autodesk University London last week, Autodesk welcomed its new President and CEO, Andrew Anagnost, ending a four-month leadership search following Carl Bass’ departure back in February.
Having spent 20 years with the company, serving various executive technical and strategic roles, including the major shift to a subscription-based model and the growth of Autodesk Inventor to a $500 million product, Anagnost is well placed to take the reigns at the software giant as it undertakes the challenges of the future of design and manufacturing.
Anagnost is a self-proclaimed problem-solver and speaking about his new role during the London-event, he underlined the areas where he is most looking forward to taking the lead. The big two are the industrialisation of construction and solving the problem of ‘push button manufacturing'. He explained how he envisions the ability to go from a complicated 3D model to manufacturing through a multi-purpose factory, becoming a real possibility in the next five years and moreover, believes Autodesk’s cloud enabled software, Fusion 360 (which benefits from a mass of new updates announced at AU) is the platform to do just that. Anagnost said: “It's the platform for solving this flow from design to make and doing it in a highly automated way.”
Keeping with the theme of connected, multi-purpose factories that will combine complementary additive and subtractive manufacturing technologies with robots that can learn via the cloud to make generatively designed products, I asked Anagnost a few quick questions to get his thoughts on the future of manufacturing.
Autodesk robot ASH at Pier 9.
We’ve heard a lot about the ‘future of making things’ this week – how do you see the industry evolving in terms of additive manufacturing, robotics and machine intelligence?
"We have been early fans of the rise of additive and robotics, we believe in our heart of hearts, deep in our souls, that the future is moving towards multi-purpose programmable automated factories and the companies that are investing a lot of money in single purpose factories are not going to exist 5-10 years out. That's why we're so excited about manufacturing because if you look at a factory it’s populated with multi-purpose robots, not task-specific robots, but multi-purpose robots, a bunch of additive machines and hybrid machines. Those factories are going to be able to build anything in the future and what they're going to accept is not a set of lines or 3D models but they're going to accept a stream of bits that tell the robot and the machines what to do. Those bits are going to be the currency that decide what gets made. We are so into that opportunity, we know it's not a two year opportunity, we're not crazy, we don't think that all of a sudden this is going to happen but we know it's a long term certainty.
We're super excited about the role of additive, we're super excited about the role of robotics and we also feel we have a responsibility to engage in the new industries that all of this automation is going to create and to engage in re-tooling and re-skilling the people that may find they have to do completely different jobs. We're not only excited about the technical challenge we also want to engage in the social challenge of new industries and new jobs.
You’re excited about the idea of “push button manufacture” – as a software company do you think there is enough communication between software and hardware?
We are so still in the world where laser printers and dot matrix printers were 25 years ago, where there's all of this different hardware, all of the hardware has different types of drivers, none of it talks together well, there are no standards yet for how these things communicate. It's going to take a big software company that has the right vision and the right capabilities to help bring this together and I think there's one software company I know that could do it and I think that problem is really yet to be solved. So there's still a whole bunch of work to do with the hardware vendors -people that make what you think are pretty sophisticated robots and machines, none of those machines talk to the internet yet, they're just plugged into the wall with a keypad on and that's just got to change. So we've got a lot of work to do.
You have a background in mechanical engineering and have held several titles in business and product development at Autodesk – do you think you will be a hands-on CEO?
I'm pretty deep in just about everything this company does, which is a curse and a blessing for the people that work here! Carl [Bass] went deep in products, I'm probably going to go deep in multiple things. When it comes to products, I'm going to go deep into things I'm passionate about but I'm going to go deep into the brand and I'm going to go deep into what the sales force is doing and how they're engaging in what customers are doing. So yes I'm going to be hands on.
