Gen-AI Assistance in AutoCAD

Background

AutoCAD, Autodesk’s flagship 2D and 3D CAD software, is trusted by millions of professionals worldwide. When issues arise, users expect fast, accurate solutions so they can stay focused and keep working.

Problem

Troubleshooting disrupts productivity. Users had to leave the product and dig through Google, support sites, help pages, and forums - costing them time and often ending in frustration. Meanwhile, hundreds of support cases were submitted each month, with users waiting for help.

My Role

Vision Creator, Lead Designer and Research Partner

• Led discovery from internal brainstorms to co-creation with customers at the annual Autodesk University conference

• Crafted a vision proposal that turned into detailed designs and partnered with the triad for scaling features and growing adoption in products

Co-creation with customers 💡

Research eased concerns about canvas placement and helped us move forward.

Stakeholders were concerned that placing the assistant in the canvas would be problematic and come in the way of the user. Ran 15 co-creation sessions with customers to envision most intuitive in-product placement and what it could help them with.

Solution

A Generative AI assistant built right into the AutoCAD design canvas

• Delivered tailored answers directly in the design canvas without breaking the workflow

• Powered by LLM + RAG, trained on AutoCAD-specific content

• Reused conversational components and guardrails built for other AI use cases

Outcome

• Beta launch for 10% of users (~60K monthly active users) for early insights

• 80% of issues resolved via self-service, reducing support escalations

• Research eased concerns about canvas placement and helped us move forward

• Established foundation for localized experiences in German and Japanese

The future is exciting! 🔆

As soon as we launched, we started to explore how to scale to more products, offer answers in German and Japanese and dig into what else could an AI assistant do to support users in-product. We had tons of ideas from the customer co-creation sessions so I led a workshop with our researcher and the AutoCAD XD team to brainstorm and evaluate ideas.