The future of Marketplace — benchmarking and vision for Autodesk's Solution Buyers.

For Solution Buyers, Autodesk's core products are easy to purchase via self-serve touchpoints — but finding and implementing extended product solutions is difficult, and opportunities to inspire and advance creative value are lost.

For Solution Builders, operating outside Autodesk's platform creates integration and support friction, makes solutions hard to discover, and starves the data flywheel that would otherwise drive innovation and shared revenue.

Without a marketplace, Autodesk risks inconsistent experiences, fragmented workflows, and missed opportunities to capitalize on the flywheel of innovation and shared revenue from third-party solutions.

We focused on the Solution Buyer's journey across the phases where a marketplace experience could move the needle: Discover · Consider · Buy · Onboard · Use · Extend.

"As a Solution Buyer, I identify potential solutions for my organization's challenges, work with a technical committee to evaluate, and coordinate with a buying committee to purchase. Post-purchase, I'm accountable for ensuring business outcomes are achieved."

We researched business trends across industry verticals — Architecture, Engineering & Construction; Product Design & Manufacturing; and Media & Entertainment — against macro societal, technological, political, environmental, and economic forces, then organized the synthesis under Autodesk's Strategic Foresight forces-of-change framework.

Five marketplace-defining trends emerged across all three verticals.

We selected six companies for their innovation and leadership in the marketplace model — Salesforce AppExchange, Shopify, Atlassian, HubSpot, Slack, plus Autodesk's current state as a baseline — and rated each on a four-point scale across six criteria:

1. Search functionality
2. Reviews & ratings
3. UI design
4. Customer support
5. Documentation & resources
6. Security & compliance

1. Multiple entry points — admin, setup, chat, in-product — all pointing back to a single marketplace platform for search & purchase.
2. Platforms support a range of digital products, services, and vertically-integrated physical solutions.
3. Machine learning curates and surfaces app categories and recommendations so content stays relevant and inspirational.
4. Permissions integrate seamlessly — communicating approved apps and enabling easy admin-side requesting.
5. Multi-modal descriptions with detailed documentation, security info, pricing, and customer support set the standard for best-in-class.
6. Metadata and robust filtering — use case, security level, integrations, pricing — help users surface valuable content in search and reviews.

1. Establish Autodesk Marketplace as a catalyst for user-led innovation. Position the marketplace as a trusted partner in up-leveling how customers do business — helping them harness emerging tech they may not yet know how to access.
2. Support a unified view that positions Autodesk as a centralized hub for creativity. Support APIs, apps, and add-ons within the product, and forge partnerships that bring ideas to life — embedding Autodesk as the hub of creative work.
3. Clearly communicate security & compliance standards to establish trust. In a landscape where rising cyber threats and regulation make trust non-negotiable, security messaging is a core part of marketplace value — not a footnote.
4. Empower customers' sustainability goals through education & tools. Provide education and category-specific recommendations for solving customer problems with a sustainability lens.
5. Support the changing face of the creative economy with flexible solutions. Prioritize a simple, user-friendly path to productivity — with robust permissioning and touchpoints inside and outside the Autodesk ecosystem.