Addressing a packed audience at the George R Brown convention centre, Houston, USA, Dassault Systèmes Solidworks CEO Manish Kumar unveiled further Virtual Companions, AI agents that can assist designers and engineers.
Aura – a copilot assistant launched in 2025 – is joined by Marie for materials, chemistry and science, and Leo for engineering, mechanics, simulations and taking products to manufacture. Asked the same question, each of the three AI agents give a different answer coupled to their specialisms – much like a designer, engineer or materials scientist would reply.
The three tools for ‘Industrial AI’ are built on the Mistral AI foundational model on Dassault Systèmes’ Outscale cloud, it provided high-performing models coupled with confidentiality and security standards.
Joined on stage by Dassault Systèmes CEO Pascal Daloz, Kumar performed a live demo showcasing the new Solidworks AI Leo. Running in Solidworks 3DExperience XDesign, initial drawings were transformed to sketch (with adjustable measurements and parameters), before Sketch-to-3D transformed this into a 3D parametric model, while surrogate modelling allows Leo to conduct performance analysis on the modelling – running an FEA study on the part with nothing more than a simple prompt in a fast, computationally cheap mathematical approximation.
“AI is just the multiplier, you are the value,” said Kumar, as the family of Dassault speakers were all keen to reassure the room full of designers and engineers that its plan is not to replace them, while promising more is yet to come from its AI arsenal.
While AI continued to be the key focus for keynote presentations, the breakout sessions perhaps better reflected the audience’s priority, with only 5% of the 355 covering AI.
More news to follow from 3DExperience World during the week, including announcement from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
