At Forge DevCon 2018 in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, we announced the Forge 3ds Max Design Automation service is now available in beta. Find the main announcement here: https://forge.autodesk.com/blog/forge-3ds-max-design-automation-public-beta.
What is Forge Design Automation? Well it allows you to run automation jobs in the Forge cloud services, and make use of cloud processing. This allows all sorts of options! From commercial configurator type websites, to internal company automation processing that frees up local licenses for real work. :-)
If you are not familiar with Autodesk Forge cloud services, see here: https://forge.autodesk.com/
If you do not have any prior Forge experience, to get started, I would recommend going through some of the basic tutorials first. These can be found here: https://forge.autodesk.com/developer/getting-started. The account setup and OAuth authentication APIs are the same for all Forge services. Once you have that basic understanding, then you can follow the Forge blog announcement post to get started with a 3ds Max Design Automation sample that uses NodeJS.
If you are interested in the Forge related classes at Autodesk University, check it out here: Forge AU Classes, and see here for all the 3ds Max AU Classes.
Just think of all the possibilities for using Design Automation!