I've been writing about BIM for the last year or so — the incumbents, the challengers, where AI fits, what the structural moats actually are. Each post argued a specific point. At some point it made sense to pull the argument together into something more complete.
That's what this is.
$67 until Friday 18 September, then $97 → https://campbellyule.gumroad.com/l/state-of-bim-2026
The same conversation keeps happening with founders building in AEC, investors trying to read the market, and digital leaders at practices deciding what to buy and what to ignore. It usually starts with a question about Autodesk's position, or whether any BIM 2.0 company is genuinely closing the gap, or whether AI is going to transform this industry in two years or twenty.
Most of those questions are being asked at the wrong level. There's a longer conversation about what the right questions are and what the evidence actually says.
What the briefing argues
The incumbents are not in crisis. But the architecture of their competitive position is under more pressure than their market share currently reflects. Three forces are active simultaneously: a well-funded BIM 2.0 challenger cohort, a maturing open-source tooling ecosystem lowering the cost of entry into parts of the stack, and an AI tool layer being absorbed faster than the commercial models can price it.
None of these forces is individually decisive. Together they are reshaping which positions are durable and which are rented.
The BIM 2.0 challengers are not failing. They are in the difficult middle of a hard problem. Full BIM authoring at the developed design phase remains one of the few defensible moats in AEC software. No challenger has crossed that threshold on a real building project without Revit alongside it — yet. The most important question in this market right now is not whether BIM 2.0 displaces BIM 1.0. It is whether AI changes the architecture of the problem before BIM 2.0 gets there.
Five things worth watching
There are five signals that will tell you more about where AEC software is heading over the next 18 months than any product announcement will.
The first is whether any BIM 2.0 company reaches LOD 350 on a real project without Revit in the chain. Not a demo. A completed building.
The second is which AEC software company builds a pricing model that prices AI accurately, before being forced to by the economics.
The other three are in the briefing.
The briefing
State of BIM 2026: A Market Briefing is available now.
It covers the incumbents and where they are genuinely exposed, the BIM 2.0 challengers company by company assessed against the structural thesis, the competitive moat analysis, the AI tool landscape, the pricing problem. And all five signals in full.
It is a practitioner's assessment based on operating experience in this market. Not comprehensive market research. Not a directory of interesting companies. An argument about where durable value sits and what could cause it to move.
It is aimed at AEC software founders, investors, and senior practitioners making software decisions. If you are any of those, read it.
$67 until Friday 18 September, then $97 → https://campbellyule.gumroad.com/l/state-of-bim-2026