Reimagining urban infrastructure with AI and Autodesk

Equity

TechCrunch

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4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on Equity, we’re taking you to Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest, where Rebecca Bellan caught up with Dara Treseder, Chief Marketing Officer at Autodesk, and Mayor Matt Mahan of San Jose, to discuss how technology is transforming urban spaces and building the cities of the future. The panel dug into how cities today are using AI to improve traffic and safety, why digital twins can help make cities more resilient to climate disasters, and how cities can integrate data centers into the fabric of their urban landscapes, among other topics. It’s a timely discussion, especially in the wake of Autodesk laying off roughly 1350 workers—about 9% of their staff—following a restructuring to focus on cloud and AI initiatives. Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is presented by Baker Tilly, a top 10 accounting tax and advisory firm.
0:17.5	Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.
0:22.5	I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.
0:29.1	Today, we're taking you to Austin, Texas, where I moderated a panel at South by Southwest about how technology is transforming urban spaces and building the cities of the future.
0:38.1	I spoke to Dara Tresider, chief marketing officer at Autodesk, and Mayor Matt Mahan of San Jose,
0:44.2	about how cities today are using AI to improve traffic and safety, why digital twins can
0:49.3	help make cities more resilient to climate disasters, and how cities can integrate data centers
0:53.8	into the fabric of
0:54.9	their urban landscapes and more. It was an interesting discussion, particularly in the aftermath of
0:59.7	Autodesk laying off roughly 1,350 workers or about 9% of their staff a couple weeks ago,
1:05.6	as the company restructures to focus on its cloud and AI needs. So let's take a listen.
1:15.9	Good morning. Good morning. I know.
1:20.2	We've got to get some energy into this crowd. How do you everyone doing? Woo! Yes. All right.
1:26.9	When we talk about, you know, smart cities, sustainable cities, this is something that we've been, you know,
1:32.1	at least smart cities we've been talking about for at least 15 years. Give us a little bit of a history lesson before we dive into the future. So what would have been considered innovative like
1:36.8	a decade ago, do you think? Oh boy. We're still trying to implement things like a Salesforce CRM
1:43.2	that might have been obvious a decade or
1:45.7	more ago. So in some ways, I think government continues to be behind because we don't have
1:51.3	big R&D budgets or large technical teams that can always be updating the latest and greatest
1:57.1	technology. But I do think, and I don't want to get too far ahead in our conversation
2:01.3	here, I think some of the newer AI applications give us an opportunity to leapfrog and not have to
2:07.2	necessarily rebuild all of those legacy systems, but really think about a very different way of
	...

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