Dassault Systemes Expands 3DEXPERIENCE with AI Virtual Companions 2026

Industrial teams face growing pressure to accelerate product design, engineering and manufacturing while managing rising complexity, siloed data and shrinking expert talent pools. Dassault Systemes answers with AI-native Virtual Companions that co-engineer with humans on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

The launch of AURA, LEO and MARIE marks a shift from static software to agentic industrial AI — where Virtual Companions act as digital co-workers embedded in engineering, simulation and operations workflows. For CIOs and engineering leaders, this is a concrete answer to how AI moves from pilot to production inside mission-critical industrial processes.

What was announced

On July 23, 2026, Dassault Systemes announced the availability of three Virtual Companions on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform: AURA for program management, LEO for complex engineering and MARIE for deep science. The company also revealed the future of its Virtual Twin Factories for industries.

The Virtual Companions are enriched with 19 competencies, each defined as a set of skills that guide users, reveal insights, explore untapped design spaces and execute tasks across business, product design, engineering, simulation, manufacturing and operations.

As Virtual Twins are mission-critical and well-accepted in all industries, we are revealing the future of our Virtual Twin Factories. Virtual Twin Factories are the new factories bringing together Virtual Companions as workers on par with humans, Generative Experiences as highly automated processes, and Virtual Twin as a Service as predefined Industry world models

Why this matters

For CIOs, CTOs and heads of engineering, the announcement addresses three practical challenges: scaling scarce expert know-how, reducing cycle times in design and simulation, and keeping intellectual property under sovereign control while adopting industrial AI. Virtual Companions interpret user intent, reason in an industrial context, take decisions and generate outcomes grounded in science and industry-accurate reality — not generic LLM output.

Procurement leaders gain a clearer path to AI ROI because each competency is tied to defined units of work inside real industrial workflows, rather than to open-ended experimentation.

Technical details

• AURA: Virtual Companion for program management.
• LEO: Virtual Companion for complex engineering.
• MARIE: Virtual Companion for deep science.
• Competencies: 19 competencies covering business, product design, engineering, simulation, manufacturing and operations.
• Platform: AI-native agentic 3DEXPERIENCE platform with Virtual Twin Factories.
• Infrastructure: Runs on OUTSCALE AI factories, the global cloud and AI operator of Dassault Systemes, deployed across three continents.
• Data protection: Sovereign infrastructure keeps customer data and IP fully protected while delivering industrial-grade AI at scale.

Softprom and Dassault Systemes

Softprom is the official distributor of Dassault Systemes. Enterprise teams looking to evaluate 3DEXPERIENCE, Virtual Twin and the new Virtual Companions can rely on Softprom for licensing, technical enablement and deployment support.

This content was prepared as part of the Softprom DistriFlow project — an automated system for monitoring and adapting vendor news. Original source: original article.