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, which provides high-performing models coupled with confidentiality and security standards. Dassault Systèmes Leo will launch in mid-2026, with Marie to follow later in the year.
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.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined Daloz on stage on day two of 3DExperience World, announcing a new strategic partnership between Nvidia and Dassault Systèmes to establish a shared industrial architecture around Virtual Twin.
“Physical AI is the next frontier of artificial intelligence, grounded in the laws of the physical world,” said Huang. “Together with Dassault Systèmes, we’re uniting decades of industrial leadership with Nvidia’s AI and Omniverse platforms to transform how millions of researchers, designers and engineers build the world’s largest industries.”
Dassault’s Outscale sovereign cloud strategy is deploying AI factories on three continents using Nvidia hardware, bringing additional capabilities to AI models on the 3DExperience platform, while ‘guaranteeing data privacy, intellectual property protection and sovereignty of Dassault Systèmes’ customers’.
Huang says that Nvidia is adopting Dassault Systèmes model-based systems engineering (MBSE) to design the AI factories, starting with the Nvdia Rubin platform and integrating into the Nvidia Omniverse DSX Blueprint for large-scale AI factory deployment.
Huang was bullish in his predictions of whether AI would lead to the demise of product designers and engineers, stating that he believes a new age of AI agents to aid designers and implicitly trained robotics to assist the majority of SME manufacturers will supercharge the industry.
“If AI were to replace jobs, the number of engineers, the number of software programmers, the number of designers will reduce. If the number of engineers and designers will be reduced, the amount of software they use is going to reduce. It’s exactly the opposite,” said Huang.
Click here to read the full interview
