WELCOME TO ARCHITOSH’S second episode of its new ‘ToshTalks’ video interview series with AEC software executives and product managers, and leading firms and their digital design directors. This new series’ content is also available on our fledgling new Architosh Official YouTube channel. Please subscribe, as we have a half dozen exciting conversations coming to you soon.
Like all episodes, ToshTalks articles also include some exclusive bits of the conversation found only in writing in this feature below. So please see the PostTalk Exclusive section below.
Episode 2
Episode 25-02 takes on a deep dive with Roderick Bates, Head of Product Operations, Chaos. In this episode, recorded not long after the AIA25 Boston (National Architects Convention) in June, Roderick not just talks but shows some of the exciting new directions Chaos is going with its visualization technology and its ability to visualize data (as in Enscape Impact).
Roderick Bates, Head of Product Operations, Chaos.
Importantly, Bates discusses not just some of the exciting new ways AI technologies will be playing out in Chaos products (including its older products and not just the new products acquired and born out of the AI era), and how these technologies will impact users and their creative workflows.
Importantly, Chaos Envision is also discussed in terms of what the product is and what it offers to the AEC industry as a new kind of visualization platform. Finally, in our PostTalk exclusive, we hear some thoughts from Bates about the Macintosh in the AEC industry. For those who care about platforms or are passionate Mac users, you will want to read that below. (That part is not included in our video recording; it’s exclusive to this feature article.)
PostTalk Exclusive
Topic: Chaos Envision is Hot, Will it Come to the Mac?
“Envision requires NVIDIA RTX technology, and as you know, that is not on the Mac at the moment,” says Bates. “As Anna said at AIA25, bringing Chaos Envision to the Mac is a very doable thing; we just need to see demand for it.”
In talking with Bates about this part of the issue, Chaos Envision is very new, so the take-up on Envision within the larger AEC community is a more pressing issue at the moment, but demand from customers can change things quickly. Still, while doable technically, it would take a lift.
Topic: What Could Help?
Besides the demand for a Mac version, what could help is extra resources. “It’s not something that is simple,” says Bates. “And at the end of the day, it would be another mouth to feed.” Yet Bates noted that Apple offered to help Chaos bring it over to Apple Metal (Apple’s graphics API). Is a port version of Enscape on Metal possible? Absolutely. Will it happen in the near future? It is too early to tell.
Topic: Chaos has Competition
Bates noted that while Mac versions of things are nice to have, the competitive pressure on Chaos—who happens to be the AEC industry leader in visualization—is significant, and the company needs to keep innovating. “The competition is moving quickly,” he says, “We are squeezed on one end by a lot of people realizing that real-time visualization is the future—people are now really getting it, and everyone is coming out with their flavor of it. And then on the other end, AI is coming from the other side. And finally, we have seen 28 out of the past 29 months of declining billings in architectural offices (see AIA data). So that’s three directions, and all we can do is keep moving forward.”
And we are seeing more and more people doing things like high-end residential and seeing that CAD doesn’t cut it anymore, especially if you want to have visualization workflows.
One takeaway from this is that while there is growing Mac demand in the market, against a backdrop of competitive pressures, having the Mac version isn’t as big a competitive advantage (though, again, that too is something that must be monitored because Mac usage is growing in AEC.
Topic: Growing Mac Usage in AEC
Despite this matrix of forces that help determine development budgets and focuses, Chaos does see a growing Mac market share in architecture globally. “It doesn’t mean the Mac users aren’t out there,” he adds. “And some platforms serving the Mac are really growing a lot, like SketchUp. It’s year-over-year growth, which is crazy for an established modeling platform. It’s really solid.”
“At the same time we are also seeing a lot of strong growth in the market with Archicad and also Vectorworks,” Bates says, noting that because their rendering software V-Ray and Enscape and other tools work with many if not most of the authoring tools out there, Chaos’s engagement with customers, new customers and downloads of its tools give it KPIs that enable it to take a kind of temperature on what tools authoring tools are growing by which rates.
While noting the growth they see with Archicad and Vectorworks, he says that many people are looking for alternatives to Revit, which has the dominant market share in the United States. “Particularly for smaller projects,” he adds. “And we are seeing more and more people doing things like high-end residential and seeing that CAD doesn’t cut it anymore, especially if you want to have visualization workflows.”
Topic: Growth in Visualization is Putting Pressure on Design Professionals
“I think part of what we are seeing too is that the economic pressures and competition in the architecture industry is putting pressure on the design professionals to up their game to win the work, to make the clients happy, and to simply perform at a higher level,” says Bates. “You really have to stay competitive. Somebody is going to win the work. Someone has to win.”
[Editor’s Note: Article edited 2:20 pm ETD, 15 August 2025].