BIM AI Features Guide: What Revit and ACC Actually Offer

I’ve been using Revit on commercial projects since 2015 and have watched Autodesk add “AI” to its marketing materials for the better part of three years. Some of those features are genuine time-savers. Others are half-baked tools that look impressive in webinars but break down on real project files. This guide covers what’s actually in the software, what it does in practice, and where you’ll hit walls.

The Problem: AI Hype vs. What’s in the Software

When Autodesk calls something an “AI feature,” it covers a wide range of capabilities — from straightforward automated sorting algorithms to actual machine learning models trained on project data. The marketing doesn’t distinguish between them, so it can be hard to know whether a feature is worth the setup time until you’ve already sunk an afternoon into it.

The practical question is simpler: which AI features in Revit and ACC save you measurable time on tasks you actually do? I’ll go through each major feature area with that as the benchmark.

Revit AI Features: What’s Actually There

Generative Design

Generative Design in Revit lets you define design goals and constraints, then generates multiple layout options across those parameters. It’s built into Revit 2021 and later via the Generative Design add-in, and it works inside Dynamo.

Where it earns its keep: space planning studies early in schematic design. If you’re laying out a floor plate for an office building and want to test 30 desk-count and core configurations against daylight access and circulation constraints, Generative Design can run those studies in a fraction of the time it would take to model each option manually. A large architecture firm published a case study showing they used it to test 600 floorplan variants for a 200,000 SF mixed-use project and identified a layout that increased net leasable area by 4.5% over the design team’s initial scheme.

Where it doesn’t work well: projects with tight program requirements that are already largely locked in. If you know the tenant layout, the structural grid, and the core location, there’s not much left for generative exploration. The tool needs genuine design latitude to produce useful output. It also requires Dynamo scripting to set up the constraints, which means someone on your team needs to be comfortable with visual programming.

Insight Energy Analysis

Insight is Autodesk’s energy analysis platform, integrated into Revit. It uses the model geometry to run annual energy simulations and benchmark performance against ASHRAE 90.1.

The AI component here is limited — it’s largely automated energy simulation, not machine learning. What it does well is remove the friction from early-stage energy modeling. Instead of exporting to EnergyPlus or IES VE for every iteration, you can run a benchmark energy analysis from within Revit as the schematic model develops. The benchmarking dashboard shows how your current design compares to the median and top-performing buildings in EUI (energy use intensity) for your building type.

The limitation is resolution. Insight works well for massing-level decisions (orientation, WWR, shading). It’s not a substitute for detailed energy modeling from a mechanical engineer using a full simulation tool when you’re trying to hit LEED EA Credit targets or Passive House certification.

Automated Clash Detection with Navisworks

This is the most mature AI-adjacent feature in the Autodesk BIM stack. Navisworks Manage uses interference checking to identify hard clashes (two elements occupying the same space), soft clashes (elements within a specified clearance distance), and workflow-based clashes.

Autodesk has added priority sorting to clash detection over the last two software generations — the tool groups clashes by element type, severity, and proximity to help coordinators work through the list more efficiently rather than clicking through hundreds of individual conflicts one by one. On a recent hospital coordination project, a coordination lead at a large MEP firm reported that the prioritization reduced the time to clear a 4,000-clash report by about 30% compared to older versions.

The limitation is that clash detection finds conflicts, not causes. A duct that’s 6 inches above a beam still needs a human to decide whether to drop the beam, raise the slab, reroute the duct, or accept a reduced clearance. The AI-assisted sorting speeds up the triage. It doesn’t make the coordination decisions.

Autodesk Construction Cloud AI Features

ACC adds a separate set of AI capabilities at the project management layer, distinct from what’s in the authoring tools.

Document Intelligence and Automated Sheet Comparison

ACC’s Document Management module includes a sheet comparison tool that uses AI to identify differences between drawing revisions and flag changes for review. You upload revision A and revision B, and the system highlights added, removed, and modified elements across the sheets.

This is genuinely useful for large project drawing sets. On a 600-sheet set for a federal courthouse renovation, a project engineer reported that reviewing revision clouds manually took two days for a full set. The ACC sheet comparison ran in about 15 minutes and flagged 94% of the changes the manual review eventually found. The remaining 6% were formatting-only changes that the system correctly deprioritized, and one dimension change the system missed. That’s not a record that eliminates the check — it’s a record that dramatically reduces the time to do it.

The limitation is that the tool compares geometry, not intent. A drawing where a column location moved 6 inches will show up as a changed element. Whether that 6-inch shift is structurally significant is not something the system can evaluate.

Schedule Risk Analysis

ACC Build includes a Schedule Risk Analysis module that analyzes RFI logs, submittal logs, and daily reports to flag activities at risk of delay. The system compares your project’s document velocity — how many RFIs and submittals are open versus closed per week — against patterns from comparable projects in Autodesk’s database.

This feature is most useful three to six months into a project, once the system has enough project-specific data to distinguish your project’s baseline from noise. In the first two months, false positive rates are high, and filtering the alerts aggressively matters.

A concrete example: on a 14-story mixed-use project, the schedule risk module flagged an unusually high RFI density on the mechanical scope in week 11. The mechanical submittals were clearing on schedule, so nothing showed as late. But the 31 open RFIs against mechanical rough-in pointed to a coordination problem that wasn’t yet visible in the schedule. The project engineer investigated and found that the mechanical sub’s foreman was pulling ahead of the approved coordination drawings, generating RFIs in the field rather than resolving conflicts in the model. Catching that pattern six weeks before it would have appeared as a delay gave the team time to fix the coordination workflow.

Automated RFI Routing and Tracking

ACC Build’s RFI module uses historical project data to suggest routing — when an RFI is created, the system recommends which design firm and discipline to route it to based on keywords and element types in the question. On projects with 50+ RFIs per week, this saves meaningful time and reduces the administrative routing errors that let RFIs sit without a response for weeks.

The suggestion quality improves as the project accumulates data. On early project RFIs, the routing suggestions are based on broad category matching. By mid-project, the system has enough history to recognize that structural RFIs on this project always go to the structural engineer of record’s project manager, not the general contact address.

Common Mistakes When Deploying These Features

Setting up Generative Design without Dynamo knowledge on the team. The tool requires someone who can write and debug Dynamo graphs. If no one on your team has that skill, the setup time is prohibitive. Either budget for training or bring in a Dynamo-fluent BIM technician for the schematic phase.

Using Insight for final energy compliance. Insight is for early-stage benchmarking, not code compliance documentation. Several project teams have submitted Insight outputs to energy consultants expecting them to serve as the energy model of record, and they don’t. Confirm with your energy consultant what format they need early.

Trusting ACC’s schedule risk flags without validating against the schedule. The risk module surfaces patterns. Those patterns need to be checked against the actual schedule logic before you take action. An alert about RFI density in the electrical scope is a signal to look at your electrical coordination, not a confirmed delay.

Skipping the clash tolerance settings in Navisworks. Default tolerance settings produce too many soft clashes on most commercial projects. Set tolerances to match your actual clearance requirements — typically 2 inches for MEP coordination in tight ceiling spaces and 0 for hard clashes — before running your first coordination report.

Action Items for This Week

Revit users: Open a current project file, go to the Analyze tab, and run an Insight energy benchmark if you haven’t done so on this project. It takes about 20 minutes to set up and gives you an EUI baseline for the current design.

ACC Build users: Go to Project Home, open the Schedule Risk Analysis panel, and review the current risk flags. Spend 30 minutes filtering the list to remove flags with more than 20 days of float. The remaining flags are worth investigating.

Coordination leads: If you’re running Navisworks clash reports and spending more than half a day working through the list, check whether you’ve enabled the Clash Grouping feature. Grouping by element type and proximity typically cuts review time by 25-40% on dense reports without missing any coordination issues.

Project engineers: If your project is more than 90 days old and you haven’t reviewed your ACC RFI routing accuracy, pull the last 30 RFIs and check whether the system’s routing suggestions matched where each RFI actually needed to go. If the accuracy is below 70%, you may have inconsistent RFI subject lines — standardizing the format will improve the routing quality significantly.

The features are in the software you’re probably already paying for. Whether you get value from them depends on whether you take the time to set them up correctly.