Today marks a milestone in how the industry works. With the 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA R2026x FD03, Virtual Companions – AURA, LEO, and MARIE – are now globally available on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform SaaS, in the Age of Industrial AI.
More than AI assistants, Virtual Companions are trusted experts who embody decades of industrial knowledge and know‑how. They understand your intent, reason with Industry World Models grounded in the laws of physics and materials science, and orchestrate actions across the full lifecycle of your products, helping you see the invisible and achieve the impossible, before anything physically exists.
This is not about adding AI to your tools. It is a new kind of teamwork, humans and Virtual Companions co‑creating, safely and at scale, on your most complex challenges.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform integrates AI-driven Virtual Companions and Generative Experiences to boost efficiency and accelerate innovation.
AI That Understands You
The AI revolution is transforming industry, but general-purpose AI has repeatedly disrupted established processes and eroded critical skills. Companies need serious, robust AI tools built on scientific data, AI that augments human expertise, protects institutional knowledge, and integrates seamlessly into specialized industrial workflows.
CATIA answers this call with Industrial AI agents built for industrial design work. These are not simply LLMs or generic generative AIs. They are AI experts built on the 3DEXPERIENCE data platform, trained with the context of industrial use cases, connected directly to CATIA, and equipped with physics-based checks to ensure generated designs are realistic and compliant.
Dassault Systèmes has decades of experience supporting manufacturers. Its products unify modeling and simulation (MODSIM) with CATIA design tools and SIMULIA simulation tools on the same platform, the ideal foundation for robust industrial AI.
Virtual Companions: The AI-Powered Virtual Workforce
Virtual Companions are the AI-powered virtual workforce of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform SaaS. They reason, plan, and act to address complex industrial problems and interact with users through natural conversations.
Each Virtual Companion has:
- A specific mission
- A set of Competencies
- A distinct personality
Competencies represent the ability to perform a particular industrial job or purpose, relying on granular skills. Virtual Companions embody Competencies such as AURA Project Management or LEO Mechanical Engineering.
The three Virtual Companions are:
- AURA – The Business Expert Empowers any user by leveraging enterprise knowledge and know‑how.
- LEO – The Engineer Effectively solves technical challenges across engineering disciplines.
- MARIE – The Scientist Brings deep scientific knowledge to engineers and researchers.
Introducing LEO: The AI Agent Built for Engineering
LEO is the engineering Virtual Companion. It is not a chatbot or simple automation tool, it is a virtual teammate that interfaces directly with CATIA and SIMULIA tools to build models and process data.
LEO embodies specific industry knowledge and comes installed with Competencies in:
- Mechanical engineering
- Knowledge-based engineering
- Systems engineering
- Requirements engineering
Because the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is a single source of truth for requirements, geometry, simulation, and analytics, LEO has access to all the necessary context and institutional knowledge that forms a company’s unique value proposition.
LEO is built on scientific principles, robust data models, and physics-based controls, ensuring that generated designs are realistic, compliant, and trustworthy.
Generative Experiences: Automating Industrial Processes
Generative Experiences leverage industry knowledge and know‑how to automate industrial processes. They create or enrich Virtual Twins, ensuring quality and compliance with industry and enterprise standards.
Generative Experiences:
- Transform multimodal inputs (text, documents, drawings, scanned data)
- Produce actionable outputs (deliverables, design updates, task completion)
- Handle complex and repetitive tasks efficiently
- Improve operational efficiency across teams and organizations
By taking on lower-value tasks, they enable users to focus on creative, strategic, and high-value work.
What’s New in 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA R2026x FD03?
LEO’s reasoning is grounded, not guessed. Its Industry World Model combines encapsulated engineering knowledge, physics-based simulation, and full Virtual Twins — giving it access to complete, industry-accurate data rather than generic training data. Every output is checked against physics-based validation, so what LEO generates is realistic and compliant for manufacturing, not by chance.
Secure Data, Protect IP
LEO runs on the Dassault Systèmes Cloud powered by Outscale, a secure cloud platform with private and sovereign options. Customer data is never used to train Dassault Systèmes AI, ensuring confidentiality and protection of valuable IP.
Conclusion
Industry needs AI that understands the unique challenges of development and protects intellectual property and institutional knowledge. LEO is a specialized engineering AI developed with these needs in mind.
Built on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, LEO accesses the data, context, and knowledge required to form an Industry World Model and support industrial workflows. With LEO, manufacturers accelerate development, optimize designs, and manage the complexity of modern engineering.
👉 Explore What’s New in 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA R2026x FD03
FAQ
- What are Virtual Companions on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform?
Virtual Companions are AI-powered experts that form the virtual workforce of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform SaaS. They reason, plan, and act to solve industrial problems, interacting with users through natural conversations. Each Virtual Companion has a specific mission and operates through Competencies that represent industrial job domains. The three Virtual Companions are AURA (Business Expert), LEO (Engineer), and MARIE (Scientist).
- What is LEO and how does it support engineering?
LEO is the engineering Virtual Companion built for mechanical engineering, systems engineering, and requirements engineering tasks. It interfaces directly with CATIA and SIMULIA tools, understands product context through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform’s single source of truth, and uses physics-based checks and Industry World Models to ensure realistic, compliant, and trustworthy outputs.
- What are Generative Experiences in CATIA?
Generative Experiences are AI-powered features that automate industrial processes by transforming multimodal inputs (text, documents, drawings, scanned data) into actionable outputs such as deliverables, design updates, and Virtual Twin enrichments. They ensure quality and compliance with industry and enterprise standards while improving operational efficiency.
- What new capabilities does 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA R2026x FD03 introduce?
FD03 introduces enhancements such as Solid Features Creation, Part Generation from multimodal inputs, and Assembly Generation through predicted mechanical interfaces. It also expands Generative Experiences with Generative Engineering Rules and Generative Systems Requirement Creation, enabling faster, more consistent design and requirements workflows.
- How does CATIA ensure AI reliability and protect customer data?
CATIA minimizes hallucination by embedding AI within an Industry World Model that integrates engineering knowledge, physics-based simulation, and full Virtual Twins. LEO runs on the Dassault Systèmes Cloud powered by Outscale, ensuring customer data remains confidential and is never used to train Dassault Systèmes AI models.
Innovator Advocate & Marketing Director, CATIA, Dassault Systèmes