I'll have you guys in the middle.
All right. Tell me where you want.
Okay, you're gonna sit there. Okay.
You guys can be starting to age.
All right. Got my water.
Great. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us at the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference. My name is Elizabeth Porter. I'm an analyst on the U.S. Software Equity Research team. And I'm really excited to have with us today both Autodesk CEO and CFO Andrew and Janesh. And there's gonna be mics going around at the end. So we will have a mic runner come to you if you have any questions.
And before we start, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. And with that, Andrew, Janesh, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having us, Liz.
Awesome. So you guys recently reported earnings last week. And the metrics really did beat across the board on headline revenue, margin, free cash flow. And before we get into some of the granularity of those metrics, I wanted to get your perspective on the print. How would you characterize the health of the business in Q4 and the macro environment that we're working in?
Yeah, I'm happy to take that. But before I do that, Janesh has a public service announcement for all of you.
Super important. We may make forward-looking statements during the course of this presentation. Please refer to our SEC filings for information on risks and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. And now having established that, I can actually read over to you, Andrew.
There we go. So where I'll start is, essentially, the business was consistent with prior quarters. All right. So we saw kind of the same puts and takes that we saw: headwinds to new business, strong renewals. But there was a lot of good stuff from the year that I think is worth talking about. Maybe one thing that I want to make sure that people don't get too freaked out about.
So the first thing is, look, we grew 12%. We beat on free cash flow. A lot of great momentum there. The Make businesses had a lot of momentum. I'll talk about that in a minute. But I want to talk a little bit about the one little extra thing we did see in the quarters.
We saw a little bit of a productivity hit in our channel because of the large renewal base and some of the new transaction model engagements. I just want people to understand that's transitory. That's something that we understand that's going to work its way out. We've already done much of the mitigation in Q1. We'll finish up the mitigation in Q2. So that's not like something that was a permanent productivity hit. It was a transitory thing associated with some of the new transaction models and getting some of the processes up and running.
I just want to end, though, with I like talking about the Make bucket. There's almost $650 million in the Make bucket now. Five years ago, that revenue didn't exist. And I think it's really important to pay attention to that.
Even in the last couple of years, that's where it grew as robustly as it has. It's the last couple of years is when we saw some of the real growth there. That is a real sign of this kind of connected design and make solution that's going to be so important to Autodesk's future because that is a hyper-growth side of our business.
And one of the things we're really committed to is not only maintaining the growth where we should maintain it, but accelerating the growth where we can maintain it as well. So I'm very excited about that bucket, but I get really excited about that bucket.
Great. And a key focus for the story has really been this opportunity to expand margins, where you guys guided Fiscal 26 guide for the underlying margin expansion of about 300 basis points. And you did have to make some tough decisions with a 9% headcount reduction. But help us understand what the actions are that you're taking today to help with the margin expansion that is setting you up for just not Fiscal 26, but really well beyond.
Yeah. I always like to mention that we're talking about people's jobs here and people's livelihoods. So there are real material impacts to what we had to do. But this is something we've been planning for a while. There's one thing that it's very clear and that I've had a lot of conversations with investors about is Autodesk has some overhang on sales and marketing expense.
We've known this for a while. We've been double spending as we've gone through lots of transitions associated with the subscription transition, the transition to annualized billings, and now the new transaction model with our partners. So a lot of duplicative efforts, a lot of duplicative processes. And this was something that we always knew before we rolled out the new transaction model.
We were going to have to enter a phase of optimization where we're optimizing our go-to-market expenses as a % of our revenue. And it's a really important phase. And yes, unfortunately, it requires us to take some tough actions. But it's a multi-year type of journey here. Initially, in this phase, what we did is we looked at a lot of cost savings coming out of marketing functions and things associated with marketing.
And as we move forward, what we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking at how do we tighten up and remove duplication with regards to our partner relationships, make those partner relationships more efficient and more effective, and drive a lot more self-service to Autodesk. People coming into Autodesk through self-service functions or driving upsell and cross-sell through self-service. And that's going to be part of the ongoing returns here. Go-to-market optimization is going to continue to deliver margin expansion for a couple of years to come and even out in the outlying years.
You guys are clearly making a lot of changes and controlling what you can, which is on the expense side. The area that is somewhat less under your control is on the demand side. The uncertain macro has certainly been taking its hit. As a result, you guys have been operating towards that lower end of the prior 10%-15% revenue target range. Last week did walk away from some of those targets.
My question is, has anything fundamentally changed as it relates to your outlook and your confidence on the long-term growth of the business? Are there any guardrails that you could provide just to assess where a floor could be as we look forward to receiving those targets at the analyst day in Q3?
Yeah. Thank you for asking this question. I think this is important because when we pulled away from that framework, we weren't signaling any fundamental change in the trajectory of the business or even any kind of signal about our ability to maintain the current growth momentum in the business. What we were essentially acknowledging is, look, over the last couple of years, the momentum of the business has been kind of consistent.
And we expect to maintain that consistency into this year and probably into the outlying years beyond. So we expect to be able to maintain that consistency. And if you look at any kind of incremental improvement, well, that's all going to come down to how we perform in our initiatives in Fiscal 26 and Fiscal 27. Those are the critical years for us to get there.
We have to do the things that we're going to do. If you look at where we're focused right now, there's a couple of areas. With regards to sales, we're very much focused on driving new business growth through volume and kind of realizing some of the benefits of the new transaction model, getting some of that back. Look for us to be very much focused on the things that enable new demand generation and new product volume and also allow us to kind of drive the initial pieces of self-service.
Now, the other area is we're investing heavily on the product side with regards to AI, our platform, and our industry clouds. AI helps us drive growth across our portfolio. AI makes everything easier. It makes every product more attractive. That's something that we want to invest in a broad way.
The platform and the industry clouds help us accelerate or maintain growth in that Make bucket. And remember, that's growing a lot faster than the rest of the company. And we want to bring in more of that design and make solution together. So look for us to be doing those things in Fiscal 26 and then continuing them in Fiscal 27.
Within the clouds, one of the most impressive data points from the last earnings call was the 400 new logos in Construction Cloud. Compared to peers in the space, that was a significant number of new adds. So how are you driving that success? Is it under-penetrated down-market customers, or is it new regions? Just help us understand what's driving that momentum in Construction Cloud.
It's actually a combination of almost all those things plus one more. We built a really good product. People are attracted to the design and make connections and what we've done with Autodesk Build and how modern it is and how it's connected upfront to the design processes. So when people are making choices about what's my 5 to 10-year solution, they're pivoting to us.
And I think that's important because that's a long-term driver for our growth in that area. Certainly, we're also seeing great international growth, but we're seeing great domestic growth down market as well. So there's down market in some of these mid-market accounts. We're seeing more penetration there while we're continuing to win deals and displace competitors in some of our bigger accounts. So it's kind of all of those things combined together, but it starts with a really good product.
And I'd love to better understand how you see Autodesk's role evolving in this intersection between design and make in the cloud. What investments are you making to maintain that leadership in AEC? And then also, how do you balance investment between some of the traditional AutoCAD products and then the newer growth opportunities?
Yeah. So look, the big headline opportunity here for Autodesk, as you bring design and make together in the cloud, is that we can be a platform for a very large ecosystem. I mean, the AEC ecosystem is large, has a significantly growing intersection with the manufacturing ecosystem as construction industrializes more. This is a very large ecosystem.
So one of the things we're very much focused on is building out the core foundational data platform that allows people to connect into our platform, store their data in there, pull out granular data, push data in, segment data off, control who has access to data in the process at what times, and track what's going on. So that is a huge ecosystem opportunity for us that can deliver a lot of long-term growth. That's why we're so focused on this convergence of design and make in the cloud.
When it comes to investments, I think I said this earlier, investing in AI right now, and by the way, we've been investing in machine learning for a long time. I mean, it's captured the collective consciousness because now everybody understands it. But it's something that software companies have understood for a while. But AI makes every one of our products better.
So if our collective investment in AI makes some of our new clouds better, like Fusion and Forma, and helps them kind of become as functional as some of our desktop products, it also makes those desktop products better, which is really important because it drives satisfaction on those products. And that's how we balance the investment. We invest in AI for everything, yet we shift investment to focus on the new industry clouds and the platforms moving forward.
Yeah. And we've seen some really interesting announcements, whether it was Auto Constrain and Fusion or drawing automation really driving this AI proliferation into the core products. So I want to ask, how does Autodesk's AI strategy, how is it differentiated from competitors? What are the unique advantages that you have in this space? And I'll let you start with that one.
Yeah. So look, we're all doing the easy stuff. We're all rolling out assistants. We have something called Autodesk Assistant that helps people manage decision-making on large amounts of data. We're all doing copilots. We're all connecting with the hyperscalers and doing all those things. That's the easy stuff. The hard stuff is training all these little brains that understand how to build 3D models or how a building is created or how a product is put together or what decisions in the construction side impact the decision on the design side.
These little brains take a lot of compute, less compute now that we've figured out how to hack around a little bit. But it still takes a lot of compute. And it also takes a lot of data. So the core advantages we have here are scale.
We have a lot of scale and compute, and we have a lot of data, and we use that data to create productivity for our customers by creating these little brains that do things like auto-constrain geometry, which is a huge productivity enhancer for our customers, or automatically create production stacks of drawings, so we're doing the easy stuff and the hard stuff, and we have the data and the compute scale to allow us to do the hard stuff, and that's really kind of fundamental about our advantage in this space.
As we're seeing AI become increasingly integrated into the products, you're driving more value. How are you actually measuring the productivity gains for customers? And what's the broader framework for capturing some of that value back to Autodesk?
Yeah. So we can actually measure how much time, how many people are spending on our products. So we can see inside of a company that 3/4 of the company is spending 40 hours a week in front of our products, and they have this many subscriptions. And we can see how productive, to some degree, those customers are, especially now that we've moved into the world of the new buying experience where we have a lot of detailed information on the customers.
Our goal is to help our customers solve the fundamental capacity problem they have in their industries. None of our customers have enough people, money, or material to build and rebuild everything that needs to be built in the world. So our goal is we want our customers putting fewer people on each project but executing on more projects.
So there isn't a customer out there that's going to be spending less on technology from Autodesk. What they'll be doing is they'll be deploying it less per project. But as time goes on, the products get more valuable. So we're going to share that with our customers. We're not going to take all of that, but we're going to share it.
But we're definitely, over time, as the productivity gets bigger and we can see that they have fewer people on each project, we're going to take some of that value back but leave some of it for the customers as well so that they can improve their margins and their productivity as well. But they will be doing more projects with fewer people. There's no doubt about it. But paying us, what will they pay us today and more as they grow?
Gotcha. And something we often hear about in the environment is just the headcount limitations that you have today. It sounds like we're pretty constrained on just kind of finding those new heads. But what are you hearing on that side of the conversation?
Yeah. Our customers still struggle to find qualified people to do what they need to do. Especially in construction, it's really hard to get all the people on the construction site. It's really hard to get the right kind of people into the technology sectors in construction because construction now is investing in technology, unlike what it's been doing in the past. And for a while, construction wasn't really particularly when you're in college, I'm going to go in construction.
It wasn't the first thing that came to mind. So they're having trouble finding the technically astute people that can help move their businesses forward. So every customer we talk to has this people problem. They also have the margin problem, the profitability problem because they're getting asked to do more with what they're doing. Look at a typical customer in Europe.
They are now essentially in the AEC business becoming a regulated industry. They have to not only calculate and store embodied carbon, they have to be able to track lifetime carbon of something they build. That is like an airplane or something complicated or a medical device, so they're looking to us to say, how do I manage all of this with the people I have, and what are you going to do to help me get there? This is a fundamental problem for our customers, productivity.
Right. And then also kind of going back to some of the productivity side, within your own productivity, you mentioned the transaction model taking a little bit of an impact. And it was something that we heard in our channel partner conversations as well, just, hey, I have to do more handholding with existing customers, getting them up to speed.
And so the new business piece has really been one of the drags on your recent growth. What are the specific initiatives that you guys are implementing to drive that new business growth higher? And a question I often get is, what drives your confidence that there isn't something more structurally changing in the market on the new business side?
Yeah, so first off, on the structural side, let's just answer that question first. Look, all of our customers, let's look at construction, for instance, in the U.S. There has been an 8.5-month backlog in construction for almost two years now. It bounces around 8.5, but it's been wobbling there around 8.5. That's 8.5 months of backlog in construction, and it hasn't been changing. It hasn't been going really up or down. That is not a sign of an unhealthy industry.
That is a sign of an industry that's still trying to burn through the capacity that's coming in. There's lots of work to be done, and there's lots of work to be done in infrastructure, execution, roads, rails, water distribution, onshoring of manufacturing. People want to build more factories. We're in a factory boom in the United States. The same is in Europe. They're trying to build smarter factories.
The problem isn't the end markets. It's how quickly can they absorb technology and how quickly can we get the technology to them, so just in terms of the second market, that's not to say that in uncertain times, people don't look at their expenditures and try to optimize around it. Of course, they're going to do that. We can't control that, but that doesn't last forever. Now, when it comes to what are we specifically doing? Well, one thing, we're making sure our partners are productive.
In Q4, they had to enter a whole bunch of new customers into our system. All those customers are in our system now, so they won't have any overhead with regards to renewing those customers moving forward, and any bottlenecks or problems that were associated with the systems that made it hard for them to get those, we're working those out.
We're very much focused on, hey, now that you guys are getting really efficient on your renewals, we want you to look at new business. The other thing inside the company, we actually stood up a new business team that's totally about greenfield. It's one of our investment areas in our go-to-market. While we divest from other areas, we invest in certain areas. We're actually looking out for greenfield opportunities.
The other thing is really just around driving self-service. There's a whole bunch of customers out there that have not transacted for a while or transact with what we call non-contracted partners that need a home. That home is self-service, coming straight in with Autodesk and doing product-led growth motions associated with our stores and our direct-to-Autodesk business. All of those are things we're doing.
Great. And then before I get to some questions for Janesh, another one on.
No, you're still there.
On the transaction model, so you guys are able to unlock a lot of sales and marketing efficiency, and as you just mentioned, by Autodesk owning that contract and the billing with the end customer, so what does it fundamentally enable for Autodesk from a visibility standpoint that just wasn't possible before?
Yeah. So now we know exactly who the customer is and what they're doing. Before, we'd have to reconstruct who they were and what they were doing. For instance, in an account, we may have 10 contracts from 10 different partners, and they all use different descriptions of the customer.
And we would not be able to easily or quickly create a dashboard on who are they, what are they doing with our products, where are they in the maturity curve of technology adoption. Now we can do that at light speed, which is really important because that allows us to, one, more effectively renew those customers because we line them up better, we understand them better.
Two, it allows us to understand cross-sell and upsell better and share that information with our partners as well so we can share the information with our partners about cross-sell and upsell opportunities because we can now see them all. And it also allows us to really build out the self-service capability, not just for attracting new customers, but for helping our own customers say, hey, you got a need, we'll flag it for you.
Why don't you go buy more of this because you need it? So all of that is now enabled by us, plus all of the efficiencies we get that we turn back into margin expansion over time.
Yeah, and I think that's really important to understand where you were versus where you're going because a lot of people just assume that you have that visibility right off the bat.
We did not.
Yeah, and as the partners themselves are going from this buy-sell model to more of the agency model, how are you managing the relationship, particularly for some partners that might feel that their role is somewhat diminished?
Yeah. For some partners, their only value was the transaction. It's a very difficult climate for those partners. Let's be perfectly clear here. There's partners lower down our partner tier system that are not happy about this transition because it's very hard for them to maintain value. And the only value was they were the only person that could be called to do the transaction. So that's something we can't do anything about.
But as we head up the pyramid, who are the partners that are really helping us kind of drive, design, and make, and actually reach out to new niches in various countries and really countryfying for us, being our feet on the street in a local country, these partners we pay a lot of attention to in helping them understand how are you going to grow your business in this new relationship.
First off, we want you to become a design and make consultant to your partners, to your customers. We want you to focus on custom IP. We want you to get in not just helping our customers design things, but maybe operate them as well, expand into new businesses.
So what we show the partners is that there's new business growth for you with Autodesk that you didn't have opportunities to do before because we are now an effective SaaS provider. You can leverage this just like people do in the Salesforce ecosystem to drive a lot of incremental business for you. The big partners get it.
So it's almost like the partners becoming that much more of a new business engine for you guys.
Kind of a Design and Make consultancy for our customers that knows the local market and can customize things in the local market.
Great.
They're our superpower with regards to local customizations.
Yeah. So Janesh, with your recent appointment into CFO, it would be great to understand what your immediate priorities are and what excites you the most about Autodesk's longer-term potential.
Yeah. So coming into the business, even before I joined the company, I naturally thought about the opportunity ahead of us and how I thought about the business. And fundamentally, everything that we've been talking about around the convergence of design and make in the cloud and the ability to grow the business and achieve a much bigger scale based on the vision that we have around platform and the industry clouds and AI, that was all very appealing to me.
And over the last couple of months, I've spent a fair amount of time validating my conviction around that. And that has been reaffirmed. So a big part of my focus is around helping make that vision become real. But the flip side of that also is that we have, over time, the ability to expand our margins quite meaningfully.
And that was, again, one of the things that I know is important for a lot of shareholders and was a big topic of conversation as I came into the company. And I've spent a lot of time as we built our Fiscal 26 plan, which we laid out on our earnings call last week, thinking about ways in which we can do that. And you saw some progress on that that we laid out for this year. And there's more to come on that. And so I'm working hard to continue to make sure that we realize that part of the vision as well.
Great. And one of the things that we're looking forward to is once all this sales and marketing optimization is complete, you guys have acknowledged the ability to deliver GAAP margins among the best in the industry. And the software industry has a wide range of margins.
And so what we're looking forward to hearing some of the more quantitative outlook at the analyst day in Q3. Qualitatively, is there any high-level direction you could point us to as it relates to who are the type of peers that we should be looking to that serve as the most appropriate comparables for Autodesk?
Yeah. It's a good question, and worth clarifying since that expression of GAAP margins among the best in the industry has been out there for some time, so the way we thought about it is from an industry perspective, we primarily think about design peers and companies that have similar business profiles to us, companies that have similar scale to us, but I think the most important takeaway in all of that is as we think about this from a long-term perspective, there is meaningful opportunity for us to expand margins over time, and we have multiple levers to doing that, and that's the path that we are on.
The reference to GAAP margins there was really just a nod to stock-based compensation, which is, again, a real economic cost for shareholders and one that we're tightly focused on managing, so those are the different pieces. We will spell more of that out as we get to the Investor Day in the third quarter.
Great. We're looking forward to that event. Your guidance for Fiscal 26 reflects underlying revenue growth of 8%-9%, excluding the impacts from the transaction model, from FX. There's a lot of changes going on at Autodesk, as we've talked about, with the transaction model. Some of that productivity hit. The risk, still, we are in a bit of an uncertain background. So does the guidance appropriately account for some of those operational risks that the company could experience over the next year?
Yeah, I believe it does. As we thought about the underlying business and the outlook for this year, I'll maybe go back to one of the things that Andrew was saying earlier, which was that fundamentally, the business has been very stable for the last couple of years. And we expect the same this year, and we expect the same looking forward as well. So there's a good underlying momentum that we have in the business, and we've got a lot of sustainable growth drivers looking to the future.
And so as we looked at the overall numbers, and if you think about our performance in Fiscal 25, and you peel out the effects of the new transaction model and you normalize for acquisitions and so forth, the underlying business essentially grew between 9% and 9.5%.
And the 8%-9% then reflects the range of outcomes that we see as possible from a bottom-up perspective. Starting off with, as I mentioned earlier, we looked at the range of outcomes from a sales execution standpoint that you would normally have. And then I factored in a lot of the risks for the things that you mentioned. And make no mistake, we've got a lot of work underway at the company, a lot of plans in place to mitigate some of those risks. And we feel very good about where we are.
Coming in as a new CFO, I didn't want to be ahead of my skis of being overly optimistic about the business. I also didn't want to be ultra-conservative and unnecessarily create any kind of fluster for folks. So I just took a very balanced view of the business and then layered in the risks and described quite transparently what the approach was on that.
Great. So I'm going to ask another question, and then we will open up to audience Q&A. But I wanted to touch on the free cash flow. The transaction model creates a lot of noise on the revenue, on the margin side. But free cash flow remains one of the cleaner metrics to focus investor attention on. So what are you seeing in the business that actually drove the confidence to raise that Fiscal 26 free cash flow guidance up from that initial view?
Yeah. The initial view was $2.05 billion, which, again, had been out there for some time. And as we built up bottom-up plan organically for the business for Fiscal 26, the guidance that we provided now just reflects that underlying organic growth in the business. And we feel pretty good about that.
There's a couple of moving parts within that that are discrete items. But if you normalize for those, it was essentially a $50 million organic raise compared to the number that we had previously put out there. And that moves in tandem with the overall business. So that was the way we built the forecast.
Great. Do we have any questions from the audience? One up here in the front.
Is there any update on the Starboard activist stances and what you guys have said? You met with them in the past, but just wondering if there's any update on that? You know.
We listen to all of our investors regularly. I can't tell you what Starboard's thinking right now, but what I can say is that we fundamentally agree with the investment community that Autodesk needs to work on sales and marketing efficiency, and I think that's a great place to focus the conversation.
I think right now there's so much opportunity in sales and marketing. I think we should really focus on that. A lot of opportunity. Right now, when you look at it, certainly, there's opportunities in G&A, and we'll be looking at that over time, but the biggest opportunity is in sales and marketing.
And I'm always one of these people that really likes to focus on where the biggest statistical opportunity is. And that is the biggest statistical opportunity. Everything else will eventually, over time, adjust as well, G&A and things associated with that. But right now, sales and marketing is where the real action is.
Any other questions? One in the back.
Yes. Hi. Thank you. So obviously, it's been top of mind, especially today with some new announcements coming from the administration. But I do have to ask the question around tariffs. Obviously, that is going to impact your construction companies, your customers in that space. How do you see that playing out for you guys? And how can you help your customers navigate this?
Yeah. Look, the number one thing business wants is certainty. Hyperbolic decisions that change one day and then go a different way the next day, this is toxic to business. Our businesses find ways to adapt. They did throughout all sorts of situations. Our business is very resilient and very distributed. We adapt very nicely. We just want certainty. Give us certainty.
T he business will mold and evolve around that and continue to do what it's doing. It's the uncertainty that we should all be talking about and the seeming randomness of some of this. That's not good for business. You focus on the things that are long-term important to the business. So when things get uncertain, what do our customers do? They focus on their productivity. They focus on multi-supply chains.
They want to be able to manage multiple supply chains across different types of geographies so that they have something that comes in from all the various places so that they know they can shift their business as it adapts. So they're trying to build more adaptable and more productive businesses. And frankly, they need technology to do that. So when things get uncertain, they actually start spending more, not less.
Any other questions?
I wanted to ask about the buyback. You announced $1.1-$1.2 billion in buybacks, which is about 30%-40% higher than last year. Historically, Autodesk has really just used the buyback to largely offset dilution. So what's the opportunity to lean in more heavily into the buyback, particularly as the free cash flow generation starts to rebuild?
The core underlying principle around the capital allocation policy has remained consistent. That's not changed, which is ultimately, as a business that generates a significant amount of free cash flow, we want to use that free cash flow first and foremost to invest back in the business as we need to around both organic and inorganic opportunities as needed.
And then ultimately, we can use the cash to, as we've done in the past, offset dilution and reduce share count. And we've done that over the last four years. We've reduced our share count quite meaningfully. So that underlying core principle stays the same.
And then naturally, as the amount of cash flow that we were generating or that we are going to generate in Fiscal 26 is meaningfully higher than what we generated in Fiscal 25, we wanted to lean in and naturally increase the buyback in conjunction with that.
Great. And then related on the M&A strategy, you guys have done a lot of recent acquisitions, whether it was Payapps or in media, you had some as well. How are those expected to contribute to growth? And ultimately, can they drive some margin expansion as well over the next couple of years? And then just more holistically, how are you thinking about the strategy to expand the portfolio through M&A?
Yeah. So first off, what's the goal here? We're trying to be end-to-end design and make, and in some cases, even operate partners to our customers. But let's just stick with the design and make, converging design and make in the cloud. All of those acquisitions help us do that in the various industries. They basically plant a flag on new parts of the process, either early upstream in the process or further downstream in the process.
Payments is right in the middle. It's right in the middle of the whole construction process. Pre-construction is part in the middle of that. What we did in M&E is put this right there on digital capture in the film. So we now have the digital record that we move across the entire production process. All of these are focused on that design and make footprint that we're putting in the various industries.
So we always look at this through the lens of, is there a technology out there, a technology buy that can help us accelerate the strategy we have? We don't create the strategy on the fly. We always look for things that can accelerate the strategy or that will help us kind of satisfy one of these adjacencies. Payments is a great example.
We went in there. We had the gap. We went and bought a top player in payments. And the business is doing great inside of Autodesk. And that's the way we look at it. What adjacencies can we bring in that supplement the design and make portfolio? And what technologies can accelerate our strategy?
Great. And so with about a minute or so left, I wanted you spoke a lot about margin expansion, getting this transaction model rolled through, new business coming back. So if we were to have a report card to really grade you guys on maybe two, three things that we're really looking forward to next year, what would that be?
What would you like to be graded on, Janesh?
Whatever gets me an A. But the way I think about this is a couple of things. One is we have to deliver on Fiscal 26 in terms of the outline that we provided for our growth framework, as well as in terms of the margin expansion. And we have to set ourselves up for success for Fiscal 27 because, as we've talked about, the new buying experiences or the new transaction model effectively plays out over a course of time.
And the go-to-market optimization is one that will last a few years. So we have to set ourselves well up for that for Fiscal 27 on that front. And then tied very close to that is the ability to actually prosecute the market opportunity around driving design and make convergence in the cloud, which we've been talking about.
Great. With that, we're just about up on time. So Andrew, Janesh, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you, Elizabeth.
Thanks for having us.