Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping the manufacturing landscape. According to the Manufacturing Leadership Council’s 2025 Industrial AI Survey, 90% of manufacturers plan to increase their use of generative AI over the next two years, while 61% believe Industrial AI will be a game changer by 2030.
As AI adoption accelerates, manufacturers are shifting their focus from experimentation to operational value. The question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to embed it into day-to-day operations in a way that is trusted, contextual and actionable.
This is where Virtual Companions represent an important evolution.
Virtual companions are AI-powered experts operating as part of the 3DEXPERIENCE agentic platform. They understand user intent, reason across trusted industrial knowledge and operational context and orchestrate governed actions across applications, agents and systems.
For manufacturers, this moves AI beyond isolated answers toward supervised operational outcomes.
Why Is MOM the Operational Foundation for Trusted Industrial AI?
Manufacturing organizations already generate enormous amounts of operational data across production, quality, maintenance, warehouse operations and labor management.
However, data alone does not improve performance.
For AI to create meaningful business value, it must understand the operational context behind that data. It needs to know not only what happened, but also why, where and how it relates to products, processes, resources and business rules.
This is precisely where Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) plays a unique role.
Unlike enterprise systems that focus on a specific business function, MOM sits at the heart of manufacturing execution. It connects production, quality, maintenance, warehouse and workforce processes while continuously capturing execution data across the shop floor.
This operational context provides the trusted foundation Industrial AI needs to deliver relevant recommendations, accelerate decision-making and continuously improve over time.
Rather than relying on disconnected information or isolated AI models, manufacturers can leverage AI that understands the realities of manufacturing operations.
How Do Virtual Companions Like LEO Transform Industrial Workflows?
As explained in our recent article on Virtual Companions, AI delivers the greatest value when it is connected to trusted enterprise knowledge and embedded directly into business workflows, rather than operating as a standalone chatbot.
Within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Dassault Systèmes is introducing a new generation of AI-powered Virtual Companions, including LEO , designed to help users interact with complex industrial environments more naturally.
Instead of navigating multiple applications, searching dashboards or manually compiling information from different systems, users can simply ask questions in natural language while remaining within governed workflows.
Virtual Companions help users:
- Access trusted operational knowledge more quickly
- Understand manufacturing context
- Receive contextual recommendations
- Generate content and accelerate repetitive tasks
- Improve productivity while keeping people firmly in control of every decision
Rather than replacing human expertise, Virtual Companions augment it, allowing manufacturing teams to spend less time searching for information and more time creating value.
What Are LEO AI Competences for DELMIA Manufacturing Operations Management?
The LEO virtual companion has competences that are tailored to different industrial roles, applications and operational contexts. Within DELMIA Manufacturing Operations Management, competences will support production supervisors, operators, manufacturing engineers and solution configurators.
Rather than navigating dashboards or manually building reports, users can ask operational questions such as:
- Summarize OEE and the largest recorded losses for this line during the current week
- Compare actual and standard cycle times across the last three shifts
- Identify the production, quality or equipment events associated with yesterday’s performance decline
- Retrieve the approved maintenance or troubleshooting procedure for this asset
- Show me open non-conformances that could affect today’s production schedule.
By combining live execution data with historical manufacturing information, LEO can provide contextual answers that help supervisors understand operational performance more quickly and make informed decisions with greater confidence.
A separate LEO competence could help authorized MOM configurators accelerate solution adaptation by proposing queries, workflows and configuration changes in a governed environment. All generated changes would remain subject to validation, testing and controlled deployment.
Examples include:
- Generating and optimizing data queries
- Creating or refining scripts
- Accelerating workflow configuration
- Simplifying application customization using natural language
Together, these capabilities have the potential to make Manufacturing Operations Management solutions easier to configure, faster to adapt and more intuitive to use.
How Does DELMIA Augmented Experience Extend AI and AR to the Shop Floor?
AI within DELMIA Manufacturing Operations extends beyond operational decision support.
Through DELMIA Augmented Experience, AI is also embedded directly into operator guidance and quality inspection processes.
AI-powered tracking technology learns the geometry of products and automatically aligns digital work instructions, regardless of the device being used—whether projected onto the workstation, displayed on a tablet or viewed through smart glasses.
Deep learning and computer vision can also automatically detect missing or incorrectly positioned components, guide operators through quality inspections or automate quality checks altogether.
By combining AI with Augmented Reality, manufacturers can accelerate operator onboarding, improve quality, reduce errors and provide contextual guidance exactly where work is performed.
How Can Manufacturers Turn Industrial AI into Measurable Operational Value?
Manufacturers do not need AI that simply generates answers.
They need AI that understands the realities of manufacturing operations, works within trusted business processes and helps people make better decisions.
By combining Manufacturing Operations Management, AI-powered Virtual Companions and Augmented Reality, DELMIA is helping manufacturers move beyond AI experimentation and bring Industrial AI into everyday operations.
This is only the beginning. As Virtual Companion capabilities continue to evolve, manufacturers will increasingly be able to collaborate with AI in more natural, contextual and productive ways, accelerating execution while keeping people at the center of every decision.
Want to Learn More?
Watch our on-demand webinar, How DELMIA Turns AI, MOM and Augmented Reality into Execution, to discover how DELMIA combines AI, Manufacturing Operations Management and Augmented Reality to help manufacturers improve execution across the shop floor.
DELMIA, from Dassault Systèmes, enables manufacturers to keep factory operations running smoothly. Powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, our Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) solutions establish a unified digital environment that provides real-time visibility and AI-enhanced control. By connecting the virtual and real worlds, we enable you to streamline complex processes, minimize waste and guarantee quality. Harnessing data-driven insights and intelligent automation allows for optimized production, enhanced adaptability to disruptions and the delivery of sustainable, customer-focused manufacturing performance at scale.
DELMIA Senior Offer Marketing Manager