How Elliott Wood Automates Autodesk Workflows using AI

About Elliott Wood

Elliott Wood is a structural engineering firm based in London with around 150 people working across three offices in the UK. The company designs a wide range of buildings, many featuring complex steel structures.

At Elliott Wood, different disciplines like Architecture and Engineering often collaborate using Autodesk software to coordinate their work. To strengthen thisTo make this data easier to use and unlock automation opportunities, the team explored how VIKTOR could integrate directly with Autodesk Construction Cloud.

A hackathon without coding

To put the idea into practice, Elliott Wood organized a hackathon with 14 engineers and designers. Using the VIKTOR App Builder, participants were challenged to create working applications connected to Autodesk Construction Cloud, without writing any code.

Instead, they used AI prompting to generate applications and workflows, turning engineering ideas into functioning tools within hours.

The result is four functional proof-of-concept apps built in just one day:

1. Change Tracker: register and visualize design revisions in PDF drawings stored in ACC
2. Model Extractor: retrieve the analytical model from Revit and automatically connect nodes with a tolerance
3. Deliverable Generator: collect sheet information from models and export it to Excel
4. Model Comparison Tool: compare architectural and structural models for design consistency

“Automation always seems intimidating because it’s associated with coding, but once people saw how easy it was to build something in VIKTOR, they got really excited.” — Pablo Durán Millán, Computational Design Engineer at Elliott Wood

AI lowers the threshold

For many participants, it was the first time they had ever built an app, and, according to Pablo, “the results exceeded expectations”

The App Builder enabled teams to connect directly to their ACC model data, experiment freely, and see results immediately. This created a shared understanding of how automation can support their everyday work.

“No matter how much you show people how to do something, the only way for them to really understand is to get their hands dirty,” Pablo explains. “That’s what made this hackathon so powerful.”

Secure citizen development

Experiments like this hackathon show how quickly engineers can turn ideas into working tools when AI lowers the barrier to development. However, when these kinds of tools start spreading across an organization, engineering firms naturally want to ensure they remain secure, reliable, and maintainable over time.

That’s where VIKTOR plays an important role. Applications run in a managed environment, allowing organizations to maintain control over security, versioning, and integrations with systems like Autodesk Construction Cloud. This makes it possible to empower engineers to automate processes, while ensuring the apps they build remain robust and safe to deploy across projects and teams.

A connected engineering environment

By combining VIKTOR with Autodesk Construction Cloud, Elliott Wood has created a more connected engineering environment. The result is better collaboration and faster access to design insights:

• Everyone can contribute: engineers, technicians, and designers can create and share tools
• Automation becomes accessible: workflows that once required coding can now be built in minutes
• Insights come faster: engineers can directly access model data to analyze performance, optimize materials, or explore sustainability goals Instead of isolated scripts or manual processes, engineering logic becomes structured workflows connected to live project data.

Everyone’s a builder

Following the success of the hackathon, several of the prototype applications are now being developed into full tools.

But perhaps the most important outcome was the shift in mindset across the company.

“This was a great first step,” says Pablo. “We now see that anyone can contribute to building better tools, and that’s really empowering for our engineers.”