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If you went looking for Autodesk Construction Cloud recently and could not find it, that is because it no longer exists as a brand. Since March 2026 everything sits under Autodesk Forma, and the product names you have in your quality manual, your BIM execution plans and your project set-up guides are all now wrong.
Nothing about your data or your licences changed. Quite a lot about your renewal maths did.
The name mapping
| Was | Now |
|---|---|
| Autodesk Docs | Forma Data Management — the CDE |
| BIM Collaborate Pro | Forma Design Collaboration |
| Autodesk Build | Forma Build |
| Autodesk Takeoff | Forma Takeoff |
| Autodesk Estimate | Forma Estimate |
Existing licences rolled over automatically. Seat counts and terms did not change. Project data was untouched. If you did nothing, nothing broke.
What you will need to do is a find-and-replace across your own documentation. Every BIM execution plan that names “Autodesk Docs” as the common data environment, every project set-up procedure that references “BIM Collaborate Pro”, every PQQ answer describing your CDE — all now name products that are not called that. It is a small job that reads badly if it is left undone, particularly in front of a client whose own team has already updated.
What is genuinely new
Two things beyond the rename are worth attention.
The Essentials tiers. Autodesk launched Forma Build Essentials and Forma Data Management Essentials, integrating with AutoCAD, Revit and Civil 3D. This is a deliberate move down-market. For a small practice or a regional contractor that has looked at ACC pricing and concluded it was built for someone larger, the entry price has genuinely changed and it is worth re-running the comparison you did two years ago. The March 2026 release also carried a bidding tool in beta and a board feature.
The AI features that have actually shipped, as distinct from the ones being demonstrated:
- Autodesk Assistant — the help-content agent, generally available, now expanding into Revit, AutoCAD and Civil 3D.
- Project Data Agent, in beta since January 2026, with meeting minutes as a source — so questions about what was decided can be asked of the project data rather than of a person.
- RFI Quick Create, auto-populating location from prompt text.
- AI photo documentation in the field app, auto-populating issue fields from site photographs.
- Tandem Insights, applying AI to facility operations.
Revit is now the first “Forma Connected Client”, which is the architectural direction worth watching: the desktop authoring tool being pulled into the cloud platform rather than sitting alongside it.
The part to actually model: what this costs over three years
Here is the commercial argument, and it is the reason to read a rebrand post at all.
Autodesk list prices have risen by roughly 7 to 9% in 2024, 8 to 10% in 2025, and 5 to 8% in 2026. Compounded, that is not a rounding error on a multi-seat estate.
Underneath the headline rise, two structural changes have already cost UK customers money:
- The named-user transition completed in 2021 cost firms that had relied on shared or network licences an effective 15 to 30% depending on how they had been using them.
- The direct transaction model reached the UK in 2025. Autodesk now collects payment directly and resellers earn commission. That is a structural removal of reseller price competition — the discount your reseller used to find is no longer theirs to give.
For enterprise customers, baseline recalibration on enterprise business agreements in 2026 meant some saw effective increases above the headline figure.
The practical advice is unglamorous: before your next renewal, build a three-year model, not a one-year quote. Take current seats, apply a 6 to 8% annual increase, and look at the total. Then ask three questions:
- Are all those seats actually used? Named-user licensing makes dormant seats visible in a way network licensing never did. Most estates have some.
- Is the tier right per person? The Essentials tiers exist now. Not everyone who has a full seat needs one.
- What would it cost to leave? Not because you should, but because a renewal conversation where you genuinely do not know the answer is a weaker conversation.
The wider market, briefly
Worth knowing what the alternatives are doing, because the CDE market has moved more in eighteen months than in the five years before it.
Procore is furthest ahead on packaging agents commercially. It launched Digital Coworker packages in July 2026 — Starter with five agents covering deep search, submittal review, RFIs, daily logs and contract review, Pro with twenty, Enterprise with the full library plus an agent studio. Public pricing is not published. The number everyone quotes is a customer cutting submittal review from seven days to ten minutes; treat it as a vendor-published single-customer figure, because that is what it is.
Trimble announced Agent Studio in November 2025, a platform for building and managing agents across SketchUp, Tekla, ProjectSight, Viewpoint and Trimble Connect.
Revizto did the most strategically interesting thing of the year: in July 2026 it launched an MCP server and a properties API, letting external AI platforms query live project data rather than static exports. That is a bet against the walled-garden approach everyone else is taking, and it is worth watching.
Dalux is the one quietly taking UK share — around 7,800 UK projects, 40%-plus annual growth, founder-owned and debt-free, with its SiteWalk helmet-mounted capture tool in use at Sisk, Willmott Dixon and Wates.
Asite renewed its BSI Kitemark for ISO 19650 in 2026, which remains the clearest third-party conformity signal available when a client asks whether your CDE is compliant. Autodesk holds one too.
What a rebrand does not fix
One closing thought, because it is the thing that actually determines whether any of this works.
A common data environment is a set of processes for how information is named, approved, shared and archived. It is not the software. The draft revision of ISO 19650 makes this explicit by redefining the CDE as an operational framework rather than a platform — which is a tacit acknowledgement that a great many organisations bought a product and assumed they had implemented a standard.
If your folder structure has drifted, if approval states are used inconsistently, if half the team shares drawings by email because the CDE is “slow”, then no rename and no AI agent will help. Those are process problems, and they are cheaper to fix than a licence estate.
If you are heading into an Autodesk renewal, or you are on Essentials tiers wondering whether the CDE is set up to actually do what ISO 19650 expects of it, we do CDE set-up and process review as a discrete piece of work — including for firms who would rather not have the conversation with their reseller unprepared.