2026 will be the biggest year yet for AI-powered features in Solidworks.
Dassault Systèmes showed off the new AI features last week at 3DExperience World 2026, emphasizing that most are not speculative demos but real features coming later this year.
“Everything that I have shown to you today is working,” Manish Kumar, Solidworks CEO, told the crowd in his second-day keynote.
Here are the Solidworks AI features we saw at 3DExperience World (plus some for the browser-based xDesign). Unless otherwise noted, all of these features are scheduled for general availability in July 2026, but most will be available in beta before then.
1. Assembly Structure Designer
Beta availability: Current release
Assembly Structure Designer allows users to set up an assembly framework when beginning their design. In the example Kumar shared on stage, a user asks Leo to create an assembly product structure for a battle bot. It generated a structure including a chassis assembly, armor assembly, weapon assembly and more.
“You’re getting an outline, basically, of what your structure is. So you have your top level assemblies, you have your subassemblies, and you have your parts. It’s typical top level assembly management,” Craig Therrien, senior product manager for Solidworks, told Engineering.com.
2. What’s Wrong
Beta availability: Current release
Solidworks users with errors or warnings in their feature tree can find them all listed in the What’s Wrong dialogue box. Now, AI will help them get to the root cause of the problem.
“A lot of these are cascading problems,” Therrien said. “More than likely, if you have a bunch of errors in your tree, they’re kind of related to a root cause. So what it tries to do is direct you to that root cause.”
While AI can find the common cause and recommend how to fix it, in the future it may even be able to fix the problem directly, Therrien said.
3. Drawing Creation
Beta availability: Current release
Solidworks has had the ability to automatically generate drawings since last year, according to Therrien, but now the AI feature is more customizable. Users can instruct Leo to use settings including sheet sizes, drawing standards, and which templates to use.
“Now you’re able to communicate up front how you want that drawing to be created before you do it,” Therrien said.
4. Design Inspection
Beta availability: April
Design Inspection will allow Solidworks users to ask questions of their models in natural language. For example, they could ask the mass of the total assembly, how many of a specific type of part is included, or what materials are assigned to certain parts.
5. Material Manager
Beta availability: April
Not only can Solidworks users ask about the materials used in their parts, they can also manage those materials from the chatbot interface. In the Design Inspection screenshot above, the user asks what material is used for the vibration damping mounts and then instructs Leo to replace the steel alloy with natural rubber.
“Imagine doing it by yourself manually, one part at a time. You can do it by just chatting with the model now,” Kumar said on stage.
6. Project Planner
Beta availability: April
Solidworks users that also use Enovia Project Planner will soon get an AI boost, according to Kumar, who said they’ll be able to chat with Aura directly in Solidworks to manage their projects without having to dig through dashboards or spreadsheets.
“It gives you instant clarity, summarizing your project status,” Kumar said in his keynote. “You can chat with it. Where is my project? What’s been delivered? What’s not delivered? And quick and easy access to what is blocking the release.”
7. Assembly Performance Doctor
Beta availability: April
No one likes laggy assemblies, and while AI can’t magically speed them up (yet), it can help users optimize them. Assembly Performance Doctor will evaluate your assembly and recommend ways you can tweak it to overcome performance issues.
“Maybe you have too many mates at the top level, or you have too much detail being shown in your fasteners, or something like that,” Therrien said.
Similar to What’s Wrong, Assembly Performance Doctor cannot currently take action on its own recommendations, but it may in the future, according to Therrien.
8. PLM Model Insights
Beta availability: April
Though Kumar didn’t demo this feature on stage, PLM Model Insights is a new conversational way for users to investigate the PLM attributes of their files.
“Today, users often spend time stitching together revision history, lifecycle management, where used, contained in, BOMs and spreadsheets to answer simple questions like ‘who changed what, when and what breaks?’ PLM Model Insights collapses that to seconds,” a Dassault representative told Engineering.com over email. “The user can use plain text to search for ownership, revision history, and information about a part or an assembly without having the file open.”
9. Design Change Impact
Beta availability: April
Change is a part of life, and an even bigger part of engineering. This AI feature aims to help Solidworks users manage it more easily.
“When change is inevitable, Aura helps you to understand the impact before it becomes a problem,” Kumar said on stage. Though he didn’t show a demo of Design Change Impact, the feature was available at the 3DExperience World AI lab booth.
Dassault sent us a brief video demo over email (from which we took the above image) and described Design Change Impact as “helping users make informed decisions before committing to modifications. It analyzes the active assembly and explains which components, mates, and features will be affected by a specific modification.”
10. Image to Mesh
Beta availability: July
With Image to Mesh, Solidworks users can upload pictures of an object and Leo will convert it into a 3D mesh.
“Not every design starts from a blank screen. Very often you’re starting from what already exists,” Kumar said in his keynote demo. In his example, a user generated a mesh from two pictures of a baby stroller.
“You can take an image and quickly convert it into a 3D mesh to provide the context in which you are going to build real things,” Kumar said. The real thing in his example was a clip-on cup holder for the stroller.
Bonus: Chat-driven modeling and requirements-to-model
In addition to these 10 AI features, Kumar showed off two more in development for Solidworks that may or may not be available by the July general release.
One was chat-driven modeling, which allows users to modify their Solidworks models just by talking to Leo. Kumar showed a demo in which he claimed not a single CAD command was used to generate the part—just a conversation with Leo (see below).
The other AI feature was even more ambitious. Kumar showed a video of a user giving Leo the requirements for a steel structure, and within five minutes Leo had modeled it, simulated it, and validated it.
“We are going from requirements to delivering a full functional model,” Kumar said.
Bonus: 2 AI features in xDesign
Finally, Dassault showed off two interesting AI features in xDesign, a browser-based CAD tool on the 3DExperience platform. One of those was the ability to take a PDF of a 2D drawing and convert it into a parametric 3D part (more on that feature in AI is the new model maniac). That will be available in beta in April.
The second AI feature in xDesign is the ability to take BREP geometry (such as a STEP file) and convert it into a parametric model. That feature is currently in beta.
For more AI announcements from 3DExperience World 2026, check out A tale of three chatbots: Aura, Leo, and Marie.
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