IGNITE 2025: Graphisoft’s Rebel DNA Meets the Season of Intelligence

THIS YEAR, 2025, HAS INTRODUCED MANY CHANGES—UNEXPECTED AND EVEN TURBULENT ONES. The 2025 Graphisoft IGNITE Conference was no different. Taking place in Budapest each year, this event has recently been a much smaller, software press-oriented release event held at Graphisoft’s campus headquarters in Budapest, Hungary. CEO Daniel Csillag, appointed to the role in February 2024, noted that this event, in its different 2025 form, was his desire in 2024, but there was not enough time to prepare.

This year, only five members of the press were invited, including Architosh, to an event at the Corinthia Hotel with an announced attendance of 500-plus, including Graphisoft customers, partner resellers, user presenters, software partners, distant and local members of the Graphisoft organization, and the parent company, Nemetschek. Clearly different, and to say that there was energy at this event would be an understatement.

An Origin Story

One very notable guest this year was Gábor Bojár, who founded Graphisoft in 1982. Bojár was recognized at the opening of the conference by Graphisoft CEO Daniel Csillag and spoke later at a reception back on the company campus, where he told the origin story that has become Graphisoft lore and helped to orient the event in a very meaningful and important way… even 43 years later after the company was born.

Back in 1982, using a cash award from the Hungarian Ministry of Power for solving a planning challenge for the installation of a Soviet nuclear power plant, Bojár and István Gábor Tari, an assistant professor in Budapest, wrote their fledgling software “RadarCh” for the Apple Lisa. They met Steve Jobs in 1984, where Jobs encountered this precursor to Archicad at the CeBIT international trade fair in Hannover, Germany. Jobs was so taken with Graphisoft’s 3D software that he subsequently supported its development for the original Macintosh, one of which had to be taken apart and smuggled into Hungary through Hanover, Germany, during the Cold War.

Bojár had a vision of Budapest as the Silicon Valley of developing Central Europe. And the communist economic climate of Cold War Hungary was poised to accelerate Graphisoft with young talent eager to work with Bojár. Graphisoft grew from a small two-person company to an international BIM software company in the AEC industry, where growth outperformed a strong design market in 2024.

This origin story echoed in the introductory remarks of Graphisoft CEO Daniel Csillag, Nemetschek CEO Yves Padrines, and others throughout the conference. Clearly, the legacy and development with Apple continues to be central in the company’s vision and DNA. Daniel started the event by discussing what Graphisoft hoped to achieve with its software: giving architects the freedom to design.

He said, “Archicad feels more like dancing than wrestling.” This belief and focus on the user was inherited from the beginning with Apple, and central and true as Steve Jobs himself would have argued that the customer experience should be the starting point. 

 

 

 

 

Nemetschek Group CEO Yves Padrines followed Daniel on stage, giving a brief history of how Professor Nemetschek started out as a small engineering company and grew into what is today the second-largest software company in Germany (behind SAP of Walldorf, Germany) and one of the largest software companies in Europe. 

Complimenting Daniel’s perspective, Yves noted that this is “no time for business as usual.” He stated that the construction industry was facing many challenges and needed to be more proactive, efficient, and sustainable. For Nemetschek, all brands, including Graphisoft, were advancing with generative and agentic AI solutions. Yves also noted that Bluebeam recently integrated AI and is currently collaborating with Stanford University on Facility Information Management (FIM). And most importantly, echoing the dance metaphor Daniel mentioned, AI must be ethical, trustworthy, and complementary to enable and enhance “augmented” professionals, in which AI works for the professionals and the users remain central and in total control.

Yves said now was the season of intelligence, and that it was central to the Nemetschek Group, which has over 7 million users worldwide. That growth and scale were apparent in the work they brought to the conference to share, and the impact, responsibility, and opportunity were clear. “Go to San Francisco if you want to wrestle!” Yves joked.

Even here, Nemetschek and Graphisoft demonstrated strong alignment in their vision for AI—one grounded in a user-first, human-centered philosophy. Their focus remains clear: advancing the “software-to-customer” experience, where delivering the best design experience is both the mission and the measure. Graphisoft stands today as a vigorous design-technology company, carrying forward the rebel spark of Steve Jobs’ Macintosh era and the bold, risk-embracing spirit of its founder, Gábor Bojár.

In closing on comments about AI, Yves said, “We are not here to replace human expertise, but to augment it.” From this perspective, the company is being patient with AI in a manner that feels careful, calculated, and measured. Throughout the conference, they noted the disruptive force AI has become, but their unfaltering focus on the user experience is acting like a governor on exactly how and how fast AI features are arriving for its users. The message was clear: keep the designer at the center, even as algorithms advance.

The Best Design Experience

While there were no surprise software release announcements from Graphisoft, there were many presentations that built on the theme of “the best design experience” and then integrated the current software, highlighted in customer presentations. 

Guest speaker and moderator, Fred Mills of The B1M, kicked off the presentations (he also led two panels discussing design, AI, and current and future challenges) with a very ambitious world tour of amazing projects over his last ten years, and challenged the audience to imagine the next ten years to come. 

Luca Bernardoni from Archilinea, based in Italy, kicked off the keynote presentations and presented their projects with supercar companies Lamborghini and Ferrari. These companies presented supercar project expectations, which Luca expressed as extraordinary challenges, including one particular request to switch software design platforms. This request was refused as Archilinea held steadfast on their use of Archicad, not just out of loyalty, but out of a shared passion for what they knew they could accomplish with Archicad.

And Archilinea amazingly delivered a pair of frenetic-paced projects, including building a new firm around a young, inexperienced, yet optimistic and talented team. And the supercar manufacturing projects, which were massive in scale, were delivered successfully on time. (Editor’s note: We believe readers can still watch all these presentations by signing up here.) 

 

 

 

 

Marko Dabrović from 3LHD, based in Zagreb, Croatia, presented their work that also included a strong emphasis on a supercar facility for RIMAC, a new supercar company in Croatia. The project’s complexity — coordinating over 300 stakeholders — required 3LHD’s “Total Design” philosophy, executed in Archicad with partners BIMCollab and Volum3.

Notably, 3LHD created Volum3 as a common data environment (CDE) itself to solve the communications challenges and inefficiencies they (and the rest of the AEC/O industry) faced. This software spinoff emerged directly from their design practice. Both the RIMAC facility design and the Volum3 software exemplify the same principle: an open, collaborative design experience that delivered remarkable results.

Both Archilinea of Italy and 3LHD of Croatia showed how Archicad and the rest of Graphisoft’s software portfolio best meet their needs to be design-centric, leading architecture practices serving some of the biggest global clients, from Lamborghini and Ferrari to the Four Seasons Hotels. The scale and complexity of car manufacturing companies, in particular, convincingly demonstrate the capacity of Graphisoft’s Open BIM philosophy, as all projects require working with a vast array of professionals and tools from multiple vendors.

Nick Markham, IGNITE’s emcee and a senior manager at Graphisoft, smoothly integrated several company presentations throughout the day’s keynotes, including Martin Kiss, Graphisoft’s Chief Product Officer, who spoke about the human experience, design, and the ideas of exploration and the importance of protecting the design experience. This brought the recently announced Archicad 29, MEP Designer, and Project Aurora all into the immediate conversation, but with a steadfast user focus. 

AI Assistant and AI at Nemetschek

Later, in a 1:1 interview following the first morning of presentations, Mártin Kiss also emphasized that new products and innovative features were based on pragmatic, user-centered decisions. For instance, AI was not new to Graphisoft, and Project Aurora was built on multiple years of product development, including informal internal company meetups and annual ideation and innovation internal GRID competitions. It also included early collaborations with Nemetschek and Google.

This steady, measured progress in AI resulted in a highly interactive AI Visualizer, originally based on Stable Diffusion, and continued progress with AI through the soon-to-be-released AI Assistant, currently in beta across Graphisoft’s software. Back in 2024, at the AIA National Convention, the company showcased an interactive augmented reality AI interface in a provocative demonstration that matched AI efforts offered on other platforms. Yet Graphisoft understands innovation and demonstration, but not at the expense of its priorities. 

And the number one priority for Graphisoft is to focus on the best design experience. Graphisoft knows that the AI era is just in its infancy. Taking lessons from history—and the company it looks up to (Apple)—Graphisoft also knows that in the AI era, there likely isn’t any significant “first-mover advantage” like there can be in other aspects of the software and tech industry. If AI is like the Internet, then one can think of AOL and where it is today. If AI is more likely similar to humankind’s mastery of fire (which is what many experts think AI is more equivalent to), then what happens to all of us after AI is a great unknown. Graphisoft has been first many times in the AEC and BIM industry, including back in 2014 with its BIMserver with Delta technology and with BIMx and multi-core utilization. Being first with a specific AI capability today likely means little. As we can already see, in the larger computer industry, AI chatbots are not particularly sticky. That’s because they are not tools in the grand software sense, but more like entities with a nascent sense of agency and a massive sense of intelligence. Therefore, people will seek out multiple agents, and stickiness may come down to more personal aspects.

Julien Geiger said at one point that AI is like an alien intelligence. And humans are deeply curious about alien intelligences, if we want to go down that metaphoric road.

So the Nemetschek Group’s VP of AI, Julian Geiger, outlined the broader AI trajectory underpinning not just Project Aurora and Graphisoft’s AI strategies but those of the entire Nemetschek Group. He highlighted the growing capabilities of AI—generalization, complex reasoning, multimodality, goal pursuit, and even elements of theory of mind—as a shift from a 20th-century to a truly 21st-century model of intelligence. Unlike industries such as finance or manufacturing, where standardization enables faster AI adoption, AEC requires systems capable of deep semantic understanding and flexible reasoning to address the uniqueness of every project.

AI for AEC really requires more advancement in foundational AI technologies. While inferencing on LLMs can be useful for AEC pros seeking knowledge and advice on things like building codes and how to use their advanced software, for AEC to truly leverage AI requires multimodal agentic AI, deep semantic understanding, and goal-pursuit capabilities. AEC needs AI to truly understand our AEC world, which means breaking down our problems into layers and, at the highest level, utilizing Theory of Mind capabilities.

Theory of Mind means that when two people are talking, they can understand what the other person may be thinking. The “augmented professional” in AEC is thus in pursuit of AI technologies that can, at their highest form, anticipate what we are thinking with great accuracy, and thus anticipate us. AI will be able to do that as well. Here again is Graphisoft focusing on the “best design experience,” even in this focus on AI.

Project Aurora

So Graphisoft’s AI strategy seems clear. And as Daniel Csillag publicly confirmed, Aurora will be released next year in its first phase, but it will also be modular and nimble enough to change, because who knows where AI will be in three years! 

Project Aurora, described by Director of Product Management János Detré as “high-level BIM” and the “GPS for design,” represents the first generation of Graphisoft’s next evolution in design intelligence. In its initial phase, Aurora focuses on early-stage project design and feasibility analysis—bridging the gap between design intent (what should be built) and design realization (what is actually built). The tool aims to guide architects toward more informed design decisions through tightly integrated conceptual logic. While Archicad continues to lead in detailed design, coordination, and documentation, Project Aurora will serve as the intelligent front end of the process—helping architects navigate from concept to clarity.

So the Graphisoft Design Intelligence Strategy is captured in one key chart from the IGNITE conference. The “Design Cycle” spans two key phases: (1) design optimization and (2) detailed BIM development. High-level BIM is the domain of Project Aurora. Site potential, space design, and sustainability are all major topical domains of “high-level” BIM, with digital capabilities like AI generative design and AI-powered project intelligence. Pushing high-level designs to Archicad then enables architects to develop structures and MEP systems, focus on building components and units, and, of course, architectural details. As shown by the arrow at the bottom of the chart, continuous iterations and refinements are possible in a bi-directional loop.

We can imagine API connections working inside Project Aurora, powering additional capabilities. As it stands today, CScale’s APIs are the technology behind its energy and carbon analysis features, and if Aurora is to be truly reflective of the metaphor of “GPS for design,” then tools like energy analysis need to act on accurate forms, layouts, and shapes of buildings, and thus bringing Rhino into Aurora seems like the next logical step.

Closing Comments

It will be important to watch Graphisoft’s AI strategy unfold. Julian’s chart on a new generation of AI shows the six domains of capability critical to enabling AEC to leverage AI to the same degree as industries like finance and manufacturing. Since late 2022, we have gone from chatbots to reasoners to agents—that is, AI that can take actions on our behalf. Agents emerged in 2025. Yet, beyond that, Julian showed that in 2026, we will have “innovators”—AI that can aid in invention. He cited Alphaevolve, where AI at Google in May of this year discovered novel algorithms for previously unsolved math problems. As said earlier, artificial intelligence (AI) is likely more akin to the human mastery of fire, an invention with unforeseen secondary effects. AI is far bigger an invention than the telephone, the TV, or the Internet. 

Fire was a multi-staged invention. It first led to warmth and cooked food having a profound effect on human health and survival. Eventually, it led to metallurgy, turning ore into metal weapons and metal tools like the plowshare, which revolutionized farming and food production. Fire alone didn’t take mankind out of the Stone Age; it took the secondary invention of using it to melt ore that led us to the Bronze Age. Yves Padrines, CEO of Nemetschek, said AI will transform us into “augmented professionals” and encouraged us to become dual athletes — meaning learning to augment our human expertise with AI.

In closing, Graphisoft IGNITE 2025 brought together many speakers from architecture and design with many different perspectives. From computational design and large-scale projects that would break other software, to exceptional design in which the architect said Archicad wasn’t a noticeable tool in the process, but had developed into a foundational and inseparable way in which they developed their designs. Graphisoft demonstrated the importance of user-centered design and how it has benefited their continued growth and their position today as a leader in AEC/O software. 

And where an industry needs help to advance, Graphisoft and Nemetschek have continuously and enthusiastically supported “open design”— as members of the Open Design Alliance and a persistent champion of Open BIM — to better deliver the built environment around the world. Consistent with this open design ethos is its insistence that its innovations be available on both Mac and Windows platforms, as evidenced by the new MEP Designer, a tool for MEP engineers to go from concept to complete documentation. At the same time, DDScad, BIMcloud, and BIMx have all improved in this fall’s updates. 

And this open design ethos continues beyond Graphisoft Park. Originally announced last year and updated at the 2025 Graphisoft IGNITE, this effort was also presented as continuing to advance, with a direct connection to Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) and file and issue management syncing. And this includes platform (Nemetschek) unification around BIMx as well. Graphisoft and Nemetschek understand the complexity and continue to aspire to make it a dance for everyone involved, including their sister brands. 

As eloquently expressed in his closing conference presentation, practitioner and BIM manager Moiyez Bush from DKO in Australia/SE Asia, says it takes a community to build a building. Graphisoft starts with its community and continues to innovate around it. They have centered their vision on being the best design experience, user-focused, user-friendly, intuitive, and powerfully integrated into an ecosystem of project design collaboration and productivity. 

The best design experience mixed with a bit of rebel DNA.

 

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Image Credits

Title image credit: MJE House, Jacobsen Arquitetura, Brazil. Photo: ©Leonardo Finotti / Architosh. All rights reserved.

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