Q2 AEC earnings: Six companies, one industry, four trends

The AECish part of our PLMish universe is absolutely rocking. Every company beat or met expectations and raised full-year guidance in the recent spate of earnings news. Before we get to some comments, a few key figures and announcements — see each company’s investor relations website for far more detail:

(Note that Bentley’s sale-ish of Cohesive was announced on 7 September, after its Q2 earnings report. See more here: https://schnitgercorp.com/2026/09/09/bentley-cashes-out-of-cohesive-into-naviam/)

A couple of commonalities and some differences:

First and most important, demand held up broadly this quarter, driven by the tsunami of physical construction created by our interest in AI. Autodesk, Bentley, Procore, Schneider Electric, and Trimble all called out AI-driven data-center construction as a top growth driver this quarter, whether through construction-management software (Procore says nine of the ten largest North American data-center sites run on its platform), electric-grid design tools (Bentley), or the physical equipment that goes inside the buildings (Schneider Electric’s cooling and power gear). The AI boom is showing up in these companies’ results not through AI subscriptions yet, but through the physical buildings needed to run AI.

Actual AI-driven revenue is still mostly a 2027 story. On nearly every call, management described 2026 as a year when buyers explore, validate, and pilot agentic AI features, with real monetization—usage-based pricing, AI agent licenses, API consumption fees, and other models—explicitly pushed to 2027. Right now, it seems as though AI is being positioned as a way to keep existing customers happy and engaged, not yet as an invoice line item.

This was an unusually acquisitive quarter for this space. Four of the six companies made or closed a significant acquisition this cycle: Autodesk (MaintainX, extending into asset operations, complete), Nemetschek (HCS, its largest deal ever, into heavy-civil construction), Procore ($845M for DroneDeploy, reality capture, complete as of this writing), and Schneider Electric (Cognite and AiDASH, both still pending). Broadly, these companies are buying their way into adjacent capabilities—data capture, operations software, industrial AI—rather than building them from scratch, and pushing further along the full design-build-operate lifecycle rather than staying in their original little box of design, build, or operate. (And Bentley sold off Cohesive, though that happened after this news cycle.)

AI strategies continue to evolve, with no clear winner. Bentley says it’s taking an “open” approach — pairing its modeling and analysis tools with whichever AI assistant a customer already uses (its own Copilot, Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT) through newly released MCP servers. The other vendors are building proprietary AI agents directly into their own platforms. Whether buyers end up wanting a neutral AI layer they can bring their own assistant to, or an all-in-one vendor-built agent, remains a big question. FWIW, not quite a year ago, at Bluebeam’s Unbound user event, https://schnitgercorp.com/2025/10/21/bluebeam-unbound-2025-ai-magicwand-and-why-user-conferences-rock/ , the customer vibe was definitely around using the corporate standard LLM.

TL;DR. Six companies, one quarter, and not a single disappointment — that’s rare. The construction boom tied to AI infrastructure is real and still early (though NIMBY might add a bit of a uncertainty). The M&A shows vendors are moving to consolidate their positions and grab the next layer of value they can provide to customers. And the AI monetization payoff hasn’t even shown up in the numbers yet. It was a very good quarter.