3DXW26 Day 1 recap: AI’s the engine. We’re the drivers

3DEXPERIENCE World 2026 opened with a clear, consistent message that carried through the opening remarks from Dassault Systèmes executives and the keynote address from futurist Pablos Holman: AI is a powerful tool, but we’re the ones building the future.

Artificial intelligence is top of mind at most conferences these days. The largest global event for users of SOLIDWORKS and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform was no different. Remarks from execs explained how the practicality and discipline central to SOLIDWORKS and the knowledge and know-how virtualized through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform are the foundation for industrial AI.

SOLIDWORKS CEO Manish Kumar welcomed thousands of attendees with the promise that AI won’t make design and engineering obsolete. Because, he said, it relies on the physical world. It can teach a robot dog to walk through a simple loop, but for that to happen, the dog needs a physical body with smoothly moving joints. AI can learn, but it can’t define physics.

“Some tasks will shrink. Some roles will change,” Kumar said. “Having said that, I believe the relevance of you, the genius and value that you bring, must not be understated. AI is the multiplier. You are the value.”

Speaker after speaker shared a version of the refrain.

• Dassault Systèmes CEO Pascal Daloz said, “AI is really for you. Not to replace you, but to amplify what you do … to make you even more powerful.”
• 3DEXPERIENCE CEO Morgan Zimmermann: “If we can virtualize knowledge and know-how, we can assist designers with every action.”
• From Holman’s keynote: “AI is a tool for humans to build a better future.”

Kumar used early innovations like fire and the steam engine to illustrate the point. They started performing basic tasks: providing warmth and pumping water out of coal mines, but the innovations compounded and quickly changed the world.

“I believe we are in the spark phase of artificial intelligence,” he said. “We have the fire, but we haven’t cooked the food yet; we haven’t built the furnace yet. … The AI architects have given us the fire, but you will decide what it powers. I’m a firm believer that the most world-changing applications of AI have not been invented yet.”

This theme of AI as the engine but humans as the driver of innovation set the stage for other key topics throughout the Day 1 general sessions, including an update on the 3D UNIV+RSES introduced at World last year, an introduction to three virtual companions available on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, appreciation for the SOLIDWORKS community and Holman’s plea to reject dystopia.

Let’s hit some highlights.

3D UNIV+RSES: Revisited

The concept of 3D UNIV+RSES was first introduced at 3DEXPERIENCE World last year. The announcement was met with confusion, a fact Daloz acknowledged directly in this year’s opening remarks.

3D UNIV+RSES, Daloz explained, are a response to an emerging Generative Economy in which:

• products are software-defined
• the virtual doesn’t just represent the real; it generates it
• and intellectual property (IP) becomes the true currency

The seventh generation of innovation in Dassault Systèmes’ 40-plus years, 3D UNIV+RSES represent science-based environments that bring together modeling, simulation, data science and AI.

“Not AI as a gadget,” Daloz said, “But AI at the core of how engineering really works.”

One example are virtual companions, AI that can reason with you, challenge you and make you accountable while working alongside you on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

“This is AI for industries,” Daloz said, “Trustable, science-based and grounded in real industrial knowledge.”

Meet your virtual companions

At 3DEXPERIENCE World last year, Dassault Systèmes introduced the concept of virtual companions. This year, they’re real. Daloz introduced them by name:

• AURA orchestrates knowledge and context
• LEO brings engineering reasoning
• MARIE brings scientific disciplines

These companions are the virtual embodiment of knowledge and know-how built upon decades of Dassault Systèmes’ science and industry experience, combined with users’ own knowledge and information culled from static documents.

Daloz went through a few demos to show the virtual companions in action.

The first asked each of them which materials to use to design an e-foil wing to highlight the differences in how they’d approach the task based on their backgrounds. (It’s worth noting they all mentioned carbon fiber.)

“You can see, they are not chatbots. They’re decades of Dassault Systèmes expertise combined with your knowledge,” Daloz said. “I’m also convinced innovations come from confronting a different point of view. This is exactly how our virtual companion works. AURA is exploring the different possibilities, MARIE is grounding it in science and LEO is making it real. Together, they can collaborate to find the optimal.”

For the second demo, Kumar returned to the stage and worked with LEO to create a sketch from a drawing, then create a parametric 3D model from the sketch and do performance analysis on the part.

“This part is not magic,” Kumar said, explaining a process called “surrogate modeling” to applause. “We have created a lot of these parts, similar parts, using designs of experiments, and we have trained a model with which we are able to create a new part and map the results of the previous part to this new part. So, this is a physically accurate simulation of this part. It’s called surrogate modeling.”

Appreciating the SOLIDWORKS user community

There’s a friendly Red vs. Blue rivalry that can manifest at 3DEXPERIENCE World. Red, of course, being the traditional color of the SOLIDWORKS brand and blue representing Dassault Systèmes.

Segments throughout the opening day’s opening session reinforced that engineers—and SOLIDWORKS—are at the heart of the AI revolution.

“Last year, you spoke loudly,” Daloz said, referencing the 2025 3D UNIV+RSES announcement and online coverage of World. “I think we listened. We fixed things. And we continue to fix them.”

He explained SOLIDWORKS is expanding with simulation, manufacturing, data-centric cloud, virtual companions and Generative Experiences without losing its hallmark pragmatism, clarity and discipline.

“Last year we made commitments, this year we deliver it. And it’s only just the beginning,” Daloz said. “Our commitment to you is very simple: building solutions respecting your engineering … protecting IP and keeping you at the center of the game. So, we are not imagining the future, we are building it.”

Later on, when he joined Kumar on stage to explain how enhancements to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform benefit SOLIDWORKS users, Morgan Zimmermann, CEO of the 3DEXPERIENCE brand, donned a red jacket to symbolize a “red” platform.

It starts with virtualizing knowledge and know-how.   

For designers, knowledge is captured in the documents they’ve created and approved designs, while the know-how is in the processes. Scale that up to a company: the knowledge and know-how is dispersed across the designs and objects they’ve created over a decade or more.

“If we can virtualize all of that knowledge and know-how, then we can assist designers with every actual with virtual companions, promptings and speeches,” Zimmermann said. “And with that, they can generate new objects based on the collective captured experience.”

This can all happen right within SOLIDWORKS.

Although it can’t happen locally due to the massive computing power required to extract the data, Zimmermann explained that the 3DEXPERIENCE platform secures the knowledge and know-how so that no one else gets access to your intellectual property.

Kumar and Zimmermann then went through a list of updates, including new ways to buy SOLIDWORKS, a simplified Compass on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, a streamlined update process, a new content explorer and SOLIDWORKS favorite filters.

“You told us that we were slowing you down, so we went to work and I think we actually delivered,” Zimmermann said.

Build a better world

In his keynote, Futurist and Inventor Capitalist Pablos Holman’s message to the audience was that we can use computers as superpowers to deliver new possibilities to the world. Our job is to figure out how to change it for the better.

Holman explained that, on the way to 8 billion people, humans have solved some of the hard technical problems that prevented humans from starting: feeding people, housing them, eradicating the diseases wiping them out.

“Our job is to figure out how are we going to invent new technologies and bring them into the world on that scale,” he said. “We made 8 billion humans, now we need to figure out how we make what they need to thrive.”

Holman used energy as an example. We’ll need to 10x global energy production, not even counting AI, just to take care of the people that we already made,” he said.

We’ve done this before. In the last century, we 10x’d energy production the hard way, Holman explained. Some new approaches Holman suggested?

• Launching solar farms into space
• Depleted uranium
• Nuclear reactors buried in bore holes a mile underground

“Why is this possible? It’s possible because we have a better toolkit,” Holman said, giving the example of ubiquitous AI we use for navigation. “What AI is for is creating these computational models of our world, of us and the things we care about and then it can show you these are your possible futures. Pick one. That’s our job. It’s up to us to choose which of these futures sounds better. Which is the one we want to go for? Which is the one we want to build?”

Holman said AI is a tool for humans to build a better future. Today, we have the ability to design in software, test and fail in software thousands of times over until we know the best design.

“We used to have to iterate in the real world. It used to slow and hard and expensive,” Holman said. “And now we’ve gotta do a little bit of that. But now we inherit the superpowers that software has given us to do rapid iteration. To bring ideas to life.”

In closing, he gave more inspiring examples – from data centers that power themselves with their own heat to recycling precious metals from circuit boards to cement that lasts virtually forever—which are all absolutely worth watching Holman’s keynote on YouTube to hear about.

“Now we’re building AIs for science. Now we’re building AIs for engineering,” Holman said. “Now we’re building AIs to help us create the technologies that matter, to go after the problems we want to solve.”

Be sure to check out SOLIDWORKS’ coverage of the general sessions and everything else from World on the SOLIDWORKS Blog and 3DEXPERIENCE World 2026 Live on the SOLIDWORKS YouTube channel. And stay tuned for more coverage here on the 3DS Blog.