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Leadership Edge

What Do You Keep When You Leave a Platform?

📰 Most vendors say you own your files. Fewer can say who owns what the platform adds, who pays when an agent acts on ungoverned data, or what leaves with you. This edition covers the gap and three checks to run this month.

What Do You Keep When You Leave a Platform?

If your firm switched away from its main design platform next year, what would you take with you, and what would you have to rebuild?

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Who this episode is for: Especially relevant if you're a principal, CIO or BIM manager who signs the software contract or has been told to get ready for AI, and who hasn't yet asked what the firm keeps, what it pays for, and what it can take when it leaves.

Summary

This newsletter is a breakdown of the finale for The Next AEC Tech Stack, the third episode of Arc 3 and the ninth in the series. The first episode in this arc asked what a firm's project history is worth. The second asked why you can't use it. This one asked whose it is, what it costs to leave, and what you're signing up for when it lives in someone else's platform.

I talked to Randall Stevens at AVAIL, Sasha Crotty at Autodesk, Andy Rahden at Bentley, Scott Reynolds at UpCodes, Chris Razzell at dRofus, Ross Wagner at Pirros, Aaron Vorwerk and Mike Soldan at Egnyte, Dimitrie Stefanescu at Speckle, Marty Rozmanith at Skema, Matt Wash and Ariel Cooke-Zamora at Bimbeats, Jesper Wallgren at Finch, Holger Kreienbrink at Graphisoft, Clifton Harness at TestFit, and Campbell Yule. The vendors gave nearly the same first answer: the customer owns the data. The answers stopped matching one layer up, with the tags, relationships and intelligence a platform builds on top of it.

A reminder that applies to every episode in this series: these conversations were recorded weeks ago, and the tools have kept moving since. Sasha said Autodesk's API pricing would probably change. Autodesk's own post says pricing for AEC Data Model API Data Out took effect October 6, 2026, so check where that stands in your agreement.

This series brought to you by
Graitec Graitec provides AEC software, training, and expert support to help architects, engineers, and construction teams design, build, and manage projects more effectively.
With support from
AVAIL AVAIL's content management system (CMS) helps architecture and engineering teams find, manage, and reuse their Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and other technical content in one place.
Arc 3 presenting sponsor
Speckle Speckle makes design data actually usable across projects, so your team can trust it, own it, act on it, and make better decisions faster.

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Free and paid subscribers are getting the same full newsletter for this series. Normally the full edition of Leadership Edge is a paying-member benefit. For The Next AEC Tech Stack it isn't: every edition goes out complete to everyone on the list, free accounts included. Graitec and AVAIL funded the series, and Speckle presented Arc 3, so the industry could actually use it.

If someone forwarded this to you, sign up free and future editions land in your inbox as they publish. TRXL+ members also get the ad-free feed, the full back catalog, and all the content that goes back behind the paywall when the regular schedule returns after this series.
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What's Inside

  • Yours or rented. The vendors I asked told me the customer owns the data. What did they say about the tags, relationships and intelligence a platform adds on top?
  • The machinery. Aaron Vorwerk said a firm that leaves Egnyte keeps its work. Campbell Yule said the cost of leaving the cloud has nothing to do with file formats. What is each of them pointing at?
  • On the hook. Andy Rahden told me who is liable when an agent acts on ungoverned data. Mike Soldan said he'd bet his house on what comes next.
  • 1,200 plumbing sheets. Aaron described a handover that failed. How long did the owner's staff spend typing it back in?
  • AI-ready, or marketing. Andy Rahden gave me a test for telling the two apart. Chris Razzell and Aaron Vorwerk added theirs.
  • Fifty bucks a day. Matt Wash showed me what usage data told one firm about 90 engineers who opened AutoCAD drawings for ten minutes at a time.
  • The intent. Clifton Harness said AEC data isn't very valuable. What did he say is missing?

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