Autodesk named Diana Colella executive vice president of its architecture, engineering and construction business on October 6, 2026. She succeeds Amy Bunszel, who is retiring and stays through November 2 to support the transition. The job covers Forma, Autodesk’s industry cloud for AEC, and desktop products such as Revit and Civil 3D. AECO, the product family Autodesk reports for this business, brought in $3.58 billion in the fiscal year that ended January 31, 2026, which was 49.7% of company revenue. On October 14, Bricks & Bytes published its panel’s reaction, and the three panelists disagreed on whether an internal pick from Media & Entertainment fits the job.
What Autodesk announced
The release says Colella will advance the Forma strategy while she continues to develop Revit and Civil 3D and connects them more closely to Forma workflows. She keeps Media & Entertainment (M&E) until she hires a new leader for it, who will report to her. Her executive bio carries both titles and lists AutoCAD in her AEC portfolio.
Colella said in the release: “My priority is to listen to them, build on the strong foundation Amy and the team have created, and make sure the work we’re doing across Forma and AI translates into meaningful improvements in how projects are designed, built and operated.”
ENR reports that CEO Andrew Anagnost’s internal email to employees gave her a mandate to speed up the embedding of AI in critical workflows, and called her “an internal disruptor and challenger who is willing to question how we’ve always done things while staying close to customers.”
Who Diana Colella is
Autodesk says she has nearly three decades at the company. She joined through its acquisition of Discreet Logic after working at KPMG, and her roles have covered finance, strategy, sales, operations and product management. She ran the AutoCAD business and launched One AutoCAD. Most recently she led M&E, where Autodesk credits her with moving that business to a connected platform through Autodesk Flow and with the acquisitions of Moxion, PIX and Wonder Dynamics. Bricks & Bytes notes that none of those roles was running an AEC product line.
Revenue by product family
AECO stands for architecture, engineering, construction and operations. Autodesk reports AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT as a separate family, so that revenue is not included in the AECO figure even though the bio places AutoCAD in her portfolio.
| Product family | FY2026 revenue ($M) | Share of total | Change from FY2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AECO | $3,583 | 49.7% | 22% |
| AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT | $1,787 | 24.8% | 14% |
| MFG | $1,379 | 19.1% | 16% |
| M&E | $332 | 4.6% | 5% |
| Other | $125 | 1.7% | 6% |
| Total | $7,206 | 100.0% | 18% |
AECO grew 22% from fiscal 2025, the fastest of the four families, and Autodesk’s CFO singled out construction in the fourth quarter. M&E grew 5% and made up 4.6% of revenue, so the business Colella ran most recently is less than a tenth the size of the one she takes over. The figures come from Autodesk’s February 26 earnings release, which labels its financial statements unaudited.
What the Bricks & Bytes panel said
The reaction comes from an episode of the Bricks, Bucks & Bytes show, written up by Owen Drury. The other voices were Martin Piekarz and Dustin DeVan, CEO of Ediphi, who worked at Autodesk after it bought his previous company, according to the article.
DeVan said he has never met Colella and is sure she is capable. In his view Autodesk already lacks clarity on where AEC is going, and a leader from a small vertical unrelated to construction makes a clear direction harder to set. (M&E was 4.6% of Autodesk’s fiscal 2026 revenue.) Bricks & Bytes quotes him: “If you don’t have a vision for what AEC should be in five years, you can’t efficiently manage your resources.” DeVan also said he doubts a full outside search took place, although Autodesk said it would run one when Bunszel’s retirement was announced. The article presents this as his view as a former insider and says Autodesk has neither confirmed nor denied it publicly.
Piekarz argued that running a product business takes experience building product, and said he could not see the connection between creative-industry software and the AEC roadmap. Drury took the other side. A strong executive can adapt to a new industry, Drury said, and Colella may have seen something work in M&E that she believes can be repeated in AEC.
How to track this on your Autodesk account
Bricks & Bytes lists four things to watch over the next two quarters:
- Who Autodesk hires to run M&E, and whether that person reports to Colella.
- Whether the first large Forma announcement under Colella keeps investment in Revit and the other desktop products. Our earlier post covers Autodesk’s plan for Revit and Forma.
- Whether senior AEC product leaders leave in the next six months.
- Pricing.
Pricing is the item that shows up on a contractor’s invoice. Autodesk already sells token-based access through Flex, where you prepay tokens and spend them at a daily rate per product, and through enterprise business agreements, which give token access to a pool of products over a contract term. At Autodesk University in September, Autodesk previewed a next-generation Autodesk Assistant and said its availability, rollout timing and subscription terms will be announced in 2027. Bricks & Bytes has reported a prediction from Buro Happold’s CTO that AI billing will shift from seats toward compute.
So the number to set up now is your annual Autodesk cost per active user, in three buckets. The first two follow the Design and Make categories in Autodesk’s revenue reporting.
- Desktop subscriptions, such as the Architecture, Engineering and Construction Collection, Revit and AutoCAD.
- Cloud construction products, such as Autodesk Build and BuildingConnected.
- Token spending through Flex or an enterprise business agreement.
Add up 12 months of Autodesk invoices in each bucket and divide by the number of people who used those products in that period. If the 2027 terms move AI features into token billing, you will have a per-user baseline to price them against. A first step is to get the list of assigned users by product from whoever manages your Autodesk account and mark the ones who have not used their seat this year.