Every year, thousands of designers, engineers, and manufacturers gather at 3DExperience World to see where SOLIDWORKS is heading. This year’s event felt different.
Not evolutionary — genuinely transformative.
SOLIDX’s Ed Hawkins and Guy Morris were there and the message was loud and clear – AI is here and SOLIDWORKS are embracing it.
And for all of us as SOLIDWORKS users, the practical implications are going to be both immediate and significant.
What This Means in Practice
Think about where time actually goes in a typical design workflow. A significant portion of it isn’t spent designing — it’s spent searching for information, checking compliance, setting up simulations, chasing project status, and navigating software complexity. These are exactly the friction points that SOLIDWORKS’s new AI companions are built to eliminate.
Manish Kumar, CEO of SOLIDWORKS, demonstrated this live on stage — taking a part straight from the Model Mania competition and showing how AI assistance works in real time. The ability to move from initial sketch to 3D parametric model with AI guidance, while simultaneously stress-testing design choices and flagging potential weak points, represents a genuine compression of the design cycle that previously required either significant expertise or significant time — often both.
Whether you’re running simulation to validate a structural design, managing data through PDM, or producing visualisations for a client presentation, the AI companions are designed to reduce the friction at every stage — surfacing the right information, anticipating the next step, and keeping your project moving without the usual interruptions.
The net result is straightforward: less time on administrative and mechanical tasks, more time on the creative engineering work that actually moves projects forward.
AI in the Day-to-Day Workflow
The impact of AI in SOLIDWORKS isn’t limited to project management and compliance. It reaches into the core of what engineers actually do every day — modelling, feature creation, and drawing production.
Within the modelling environment, AI assistance means smarter feature suggestions as you work. Rather than navigating menus and recalling the correct sequence of operations, the AI companions can anticipate what you’re trying to achieve and guide you toward it — particularly useful for less experienced users who know what they want to create but aren’t always certain of the most efficient path to get there.
For drawings, the traditionally time-consuming process of creating and populating views, adding annotations, and ensuring compliance with drawing standards becomes significantly faster. AI can recognise drawing intent, suggest appropriate views, and automate repetitive annotation tasks that currently consume a disproportionate amount of engineers’ time relative to their actual value.
Feature recognition and reuse becomes smarter too. AI can identify patterns across assemblies, suggest where existing features could be reused or adapted, and flag potential design issues before they become problems downstream — catching interference issues, flagging thin walls, or identifying features that will be difficult to manufacture before the design reaches the simulation or production stage.
For newer SOLIDWORKS users in particular, this represents something close to having an experienced colleague looking over your shoulder — not taking over, but quietly ensuring you don’t go too far down an unproductive path before course-correcting.
Meet Your New Virtual Companions
Three AI assistants — Aura, Leo, and Marie — were central to the announcements at 3DExperience World 2026. SOLIDWORKS describes them as “AI for Industry,” and crucially they are designed as collaborative tools rather than autonomous systems. As CEO Pascal Daloz put it on stage: “Not a black box. Not an autopilot, but a system that reasons with you, challenges you, and remains accountable. You stay in control.”
Aura is your always-on design companion operating directly inside SOLIDWORKS. She manages the broad context of your project — connecting requirements to design changes, helping you explore options, and keeping everything private. Unlike open web AI tools, Aura works within a secure environment, so your intellectual property stays yours. She can take a brief, understand your design intent, and help you iterate without ever exposing your ideas to the public domain.
Leo is the engineering brain. He brings deep reasoning across mechanics, structures, motion, simulation, and manufacturing. In practical terms this is transformative — Leo can read complex government regulations and extract specific requirements automatically, assist in setting up simulation scenarios like drop tests for medical devices, and summarise project status so you can ask a simple question like “what is blocking this release?” and get an immediate, intelligent answer.
Marie brings scientific rigour to the table, specialising in materials, chemistry, and regulatory compliance. For anyone working in sectors where material selection and compliance are critical — medical devices, aerospace, food packaging — Marie represents a step change in how quickly and accurately those decisions can be made.
Together, these three companions represent something genuinely new: AI that doesn’t replace the engineer but acts as an expert team that’s always available, always current, and never has a bad day.
What Happened in Houston
The headline moment at 3DExperience World came when Dassault Systèmes CEO Pascal Daloz invited NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang to join him on stage. The two announced a long-term strategic partnership to build what they’re calling a shared industrial AI architecture — combining Dassault Systèmes’ virtual twin technology with NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure to create what Huang described as “the largest integration of our technologies in history.”
Huang told the crowd — whom he affectionately called “Solid Workers” — that “artificial intelligence will be infrastructure,” as fundamental to how we work as electricity or the internet. The NVIDIA partnership adds significant weight to that claim. The collaboration brings NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and physics-based AI together with Dassault Systèmes’ virtual twin technology, meaning that simulations which once required hours or significant hardware investment can increasingly happen in near real time. For SOLIDWORKS Simulation users in particular, this trajectory points toward a future where testing and validation become part of the creative process rather than a separate, later stage.
AI as a Tool, Not a Threat
The question on many engineers’ minds is an obvious one: does this mean fewer engineers?
Jensen Huang addressed it directly. His view was unambiguous — AI will supercharge the industry, not shrink it. The tools are designed to handle data processing, validation, and the mechanical heavy lifting so that the people using SOLIDWORKS can focus on what humans do best: creative problem solving, innovation, and judgement calls that require real-world experience.
Dassault Systèmes’ own framing reinforces this. They’ve delivered over 200 non-AI enhancements to SOLIDWORKS this year based on direct user feedback, including more than 30 items from users’ Top 10 requested features. The message is clear — AI is the newest and most powerful tool in the toolbox, but the craftsman is still the craftsman.
What’s Coming and When
For SOLIDWORKS users planning ahead, the timeline is worth noting. Leo launches mid-2026, with Marie to follow later in the year. Aura is already operational within the 3DExperience platform. The NVIDIA partnership will continue to deepen, with shared infrastructure being deployed across three continents through Dassault Systèmes’ OUTSCALE sovereign cloud — meaning performance and data security scale together.
This is not a distant roadmap. It is happening now, and at SOLIDX, we’re tracking every development closely so our customers are ready to take advantage as each capability becomes available.
If you want to understand how these tools will affect your specific workflows, get in touch.