You’re reading Engineering Paper, and here’s the latest design and simulation software news.

Nvidia and Synopsys have announced a new strategic partnership that aims to tighten the bond between Nvidia’s computing hardware and Synopsys’ engineering software. As any good strategic partner would, Nvidia has also invested $2 billion in Synopsys common stock.

Naturally, AI is a big part of the new partnership. Nvidia and Synopsys will integrate their respective agentic AI technologies, including Synopsys AgentEngineer, Nvidia NIM microservices, Nvidia NeMo Agent Toolkit and Nvidia Nemotron. Synopsys will further tap into Nvidia’s CUDA-X AI libraries to optimize its simulation software for GPU computing.

The non-exclusive partnership will also include a collaboration on digital twin technologies, a focus on cloud solutions and joint go-to-market initiatives.

“Our partnership with Synopsys harnesses the power of Nvidia accelerated computing and AI to reimagine engineering and design — empowering engineers to invent the extraordinary products that will shape our future,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in the joint press release.

Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi filled out the same mad lib with slightly different words: “Together we will re-engineer engineering and empower innovators everywhere to more efficiently realize their innovations.”

Comsol releases Multiphysics version 6.4

Comsol has released the latest update to its simulation platform, Comsol Multiphysics version 6.4. It comes with new features, expanded capabilities, and major performance improvements, according to Comsol.

Among the version 6.4 updates is GPU support for all physics via Nvidia’s cuDSS direct sparse solver library, which Comsol says can provide substantial speedups compared to CPU-based solvers. The new release also supports multi-GPU acceleration for acoustics simulations, another potential speedup.

Another release highlight is the new Granular Flow Module, which uses the discrete element method to simulate grain and powder systems being mixed or conveyed.

Comsol Multiphysics 6.4 users will also have access to AI-assisted simulation through a chatbot window that now supports connections to OpenAI API-compatible LLMs including GPT-5, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and more. Comsol says this will enable model-aware assistance that leverages active simulation information along with Comsol documentation.

For a full list of the Multiphysics 6.4 updates, including geometry and meshing enhancements, new capabilities in the Application Builder, and new visualization features, check out the Comsol Multiphysics 6.4 release highlights.

Veni, Vidi, Vinci

A startup called Vinci has emerged from stealth with an AI solution for semiconductor thermal simulation. The company announced $46 million in total funding and boasts that its physics-based AI software runs up to 1000x faster than conventional FEA tools.

Vinci says that its AI foundation model can currently simulate steady-state conduction, transient conduction, and steady-state thermoelasticity.  According to Vinci, the AI software does not require meshing, does not hallucinate (the press release boldly claims “guaranteed accuracy”), and does not require nor train on proprietary customer data.

“Vinci empowers engineers to simulate how designs will perform in seconds instead of days, at a fraction of the compute cost,” said Vinci CEO Hardik Kabaria in the company’s press release. “On next-generation geometries that conventional tools must simplify, such as nanometer-scale components on centimeter-scale dies, Vinci maintains full-fidelity accuracy.”

Vinci says its software is already deployed at three leading semiconductor manufacturers, and has been successfully benchmarked at several more. The startup is currently offering scheduled demos through its website.

Quick hits

• In more Synopsys news, developer JuliaHub has announced that its Dyad simulation platform will be integrated with Ansys TwinAI (Ansys is now owned by Synopsys) to “combine physics-based simulation with adaptive AI models, allowing engineers to create ‘hybrid digital twins’ that are both predictive and grounded in physical laws.”
• CAM developer Ency has released Ency 2.5, an update with “130 changes focused on smoother day-to-day workflows and increased stability across machining, simulation, and platform features.”
• Artec 3D has launched Artec Studio Lite, a lower cost version of its Artec Studio software for 3D data capture and processing. Studio Lite does not support 3D scanning, but Artec says it will offer the core processing features of the full version with a simplified workflow for photos and videos. In particular, it provides AI photogrammetry, which Artec says can deliver accurate 3D models with very few photos. Artec Studio Lite is available in two tiers: Business ($960 per year) and Individual ($480 per year). The full version, Artec Studio Pro, costs $1,700 per year.

One last link

If you made it this far, you must like engineering news roundups. So here’s another one for you, from Engineering.com senior editor Ian Wright: 3D printing research roundup: Fast-curing concrete, blood vessels on a chip, micro delta robots and more!

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

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PTC has announced that it’s selling Kepware and ThingWorx, its brands for industrial connectivity and Internet of Things (IoT) software, to asset management firm TPG.

You might find this news surprising. PTC has long been bullish on those brands, particularly ThingWorx, which it bought in 2013 for approximately $112 million. The company even adapted the brand name for its erstwhile annual user conference, PTC LiveWorx, the last of which was in 2023.

ThingWorx was the first of several acquisitions for an IoT strategy that would cost PTC half a billion dollars over the next few years. PTC bought Kepware in 2015 for over $100M, machine connectivity provider Axeda in 2014 for $170M, and big data platform Coldlight in 2015 for $105M.

Industry watchers at the time noted the gamble PTC was taking on IoT. In 2015, Engineering.com contributor Verdi Ogewell asked: Is PTC’s CEO Jim Heppelmann Playing with Fire? to which the then-CEO replied: “[W]e are confident, and our customers agree, that not only is IoT an exciting new opportunity, but it will also reset expectations in the arenas of CAD, PLM, ALM [applications lifecycle management] and SLM [service lifecycle management].”

Ten years later, however, Heppelmann was gone (replaced by Neil Barua) and the IoT shine was starting to wear off. This summer a rumor was swirling that PTC might be acquired by Autodesk, and writing about that possibility, Engineering.com contributor Lionel Grealou noted that “ThingWorx and Kepware, once central to PTC’s digital transformation narrative, now appear most vulnerable to divestment.”

The Autodesk rumor went nowhere, but ThingWorx and Kepware have indeed gone somewhere. TPG and PTC didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition, but they expect the transaction to close in the first half of 2026.

“We’re pleased to reach this agreement with TPG as we increase our focus on delivering our Intelligent Product Lifecycle vision for customers through our core CAD, PLM, ALM, and SLM offerings and the ongoing adoption of AI and SaaS,” Barua said in the joint press release.

Let’s check back in ten years to see how the AI play pays off. Speaking of…

Tech Soft 3D launches HOOPS AI for CAD machine learning

Engineering software development kit (SDK) provider Tech Soft 3D has launched HOOPS AI, a new tool that it says is “purpose-built to unlock AI and machine learning for CAD data.”

According to Tech Soft 3D, HOOPS AI is an end-to-end solution for CAD-based machine learning. It ingests and prepares CAD data, provides pre-built neural architectures for CAD tasks like feature recognition, and has built in visualization tools, among other features. It’s a standalone product that incorporates features from Tech Soft 3D’s HOOPS Exchange (for CAD data translation) and HOOPS Visualize (for CAD rendering).

“HOOPS AI represents a major leap forward for organizations looking to finally harness artificial intelligence for 3D CAD,” said Gavin Bridgeman, CTO of Tech Soft 3D, in the company’s press release. “It provides a complete, reproducible pipeline that makes machine learning workflows with CAD data both practical and scalable.”

Quick hits

• Chaos has released Vantage 3, the latest update to its real-time visualization platform for AEC. The update adds support for USD, MaterialX, and Gaussian splatting, as well as a new camera tracking features, a new material editor, extended texture support, and more.
• Siemens has introduced Electrical Designer for its TIA Selection Tool Cloud. The new feature aims to simplify main circuit design by automatically selecting components, verifying short circuits, sizing cables, and creating documentation, all in accordance with IEC standards, according to Siemens.
• Celus, a developer of AI-based electronics design software, and NextPCB, a PCB manufacturer, have announced a strategic partnership that will allow NextPCB customers access to the Celus Design Platform.

One last link

Who figured software licensing could be such a dynamic topic? Here’s Lionel Grealou again with From seats to outcomes: rethinking engineering software licensing.

Engineering Paper will be off for the next two weeks. See you in December.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post PTC’s IoT dream ends with sale of ThingWorx and Kepware appeared first on Engineering.com.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Flux, a browser-based ECAD tool, and its announcement of new AI capabilities to design circuit boards from text prompts.

I’ve since had the chance to speak with Flux CEO Matthias Wagner to learn more about the platform and its AI features. Like many founders of engineering software startups that I’ve spoken to recently, Wagner, a former Facebook product manager, was fed up with the stale state of design software—especially in comparison to tools for developing software.

“Hardware was somehow still stuck in what could have been the 90s,” he complained. And complained. And complained some more. Wagner grumbled about the problem so much that eventually a friend told him to “either do something about it or stop talking about it.”

He chose door number two, and in 2019 he founded Flux, a cloud-based tool for electronic design with modern features like real-time collaboration. But by 2025 Flux, like many design tools, has become enraptured by AI, and so has Wagner’s vision for the platform.

“You can go to ChatGPT and turn a prompt into a poem, into a recipe, into everything,” Wagner began. “We want to enable that for atoms. We want to enable people to go from a text prompt to a manufactured piece of hardware.”

How close is Flux to that vision today? I asked.

“It’s day one,” Wagner said. “Just two weeks ago we shipped what I call an AI hardware engineering intern that has incredible capabilities, but oftentimes requires some supervision by somebody who’s more experienced.”

All Flux users can now access that AI intern in beta (“I feel like interns are professionals in beta,” Wagner quipped). The AI can help electrical engineers across their entire workflow, from planning a design to laying out a circuit schematic to optimizing and debugging boards, according to Wagner.

“When it works, it’s magical,” he said. “There’s a lot of use cases where, just from a single prompt, it will do the full thing. And then there’s a lot of use cases that will get you, 80% there, 90% there, 50% there. And then the user has to either provide input or drive it over the line manually.”

Flux’s AI is built on top of commercial LLMs (like those from OpenAI and Anthropic) with some smaller custom AI models built in-house (like one for optical character recognition, OCR, to read charts and tables). The custom models are trained on a mix of publicly available designs, synthetic datasets, and in-house data, according to Flux. Wagner noted that “we don’t train models on user data.”

Flux is subscription software, licensed in four tiers: Starter ($15/month), Pro ($39/month), Teams ($49/month) and Enterprise (custom pricing). Each tier comes with some amount of AI credits (from 100 to 500 per month) which are spent every time a user accesses the AI. The cost of any prompt is only determined after the computation, Wagner told me, adding that there’s high variance.

Why? “It’s like trying to estimate the time it takes to complete a project that you have never done before,” Wagner said. “You’ll figure it out as you do it.”

I asked if he could estimate a rough cost of using Flux’s AI, and Wagner said that the company’s example prompts (such as those pictured above) would cost about $6 to $7 apiece. Since 100 credits cost $4 or $5 (depending on your tier), that’s roughly 120 – 175 credits per prompt.

If the Flux AI works as well as you’d hope, and could truly save hours of engineering effort, then the costs would be easy to justify. But what about when it doesn’t work? If you’ve used AI, and by now you have, you know that it often takes a few prompts to get where you want to go. Sometimes many more. If you had a mystery bill due on every prompt, you might be reluctant to experiment. Flux isn’t the only developer charging credits for AI calls (Depix does it for AI rendering, for example), but it’s the first I’ve seen that doesn’t have a standard price per prompt.

Regardless, what matters is whether or not electrical engineers find value in Flux AI. Wagner says users are “generally ecstatic” about the new capabilities, but I have yet to see much real user feedback. If you have some, I’d love to hear it in the comments or at malba@wtwhmedia.com.

Check out the 2025 LEAP Awards winners

Design World has announced the winners of the 2025 Leadership in Engineering Achievement Program (LEAP) Awards. Judged by an independent panel of industry experts, the awards celebrate innovative engineering across 11 categories.

The 2025 LEAP categories were:

• Advanced materials
• Computer hardware and software
• Connectivity
• Embedded computing
• Fluid power
• Industrial automation
• Mechanical
• Motion control
• Power electronics
• Switches and sensors
• Test and measurement

Congratulations to all those who leapt to the podium. You can watch a replay of the winners announcement or see a list of the winners here.

Quick hits

• NCG CAM Solutions has released NCG CAM v20.0. The developer calls it a major release that provides huge improvements to finishing operations, new features such as the ability to machine with shaped cutters in 3-axis, a new C/C#/C++ API, and much more.
• Keysight has launched a new EDA application called Quantum System Analysis that it says will reduce reliance on costly cryogenic testing. Part of Keysight’s Quantum EDA portfolio, Quantum System Analysis provides a time dynamics simulator and the ability to model cryostat input lines to qubits.
• Lumafield has announced Auto-Dimensioning, a new feature for automated geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) in its CT scanning technology. “Auto-Dimensioning turns CT scanning into a true metrology tool, making it accessible to every engineer. By automatically identifying and measuring features inside and out, we’re giving teams reliable, traceable data they can use to move faster, catch problems earlier, and build better products,” said Andreas Bastian, co-founder and head of product at Lumafield, in the company’s press release. Currently in private beta, Auto-Dimensioning will be available in Lumafield’s Voyager software in early 2026.

One last link

My former colleague Shawn Wasserman led this fun Altair blog post that uses simulation to prove that Back to the Future, the classic time travel flick in which a teenager and mad scientist drive into the past, isn’t quite as realistic as you may have thought: Digital Debunking: Doc Brown’s Survival in Back to the Future.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post Flux’s electrical engineering AI: “When it works, it’s magical” appeared first on Engineering.com.

Siemens has released the 2026 version of Solid Edge. You’ll notice a difference right from the splash screen: the CAD software has officially been renamed Designcenter Solid Edge (for more on that moniker, read What is Siemens Designcenter?).

Designcenter Solid Edge 2026 (I won’t write that out every time) includes several new features, but let’s get the obligatory AI ones out of the way first. To start, there’s a new magnetic snap feature for assemblies that uses AI to automatically recognize mates and snap parts into the correct position as users drag them into place.

Solid Edge also uses AI to automatically generate up to 80% of 2D drawing views with minimal user input, according to Siemens. And finally, Solid Edge gets an integrated product support chatbot called Design Copilot that also debuted in Siemens NX this summer.

These aren’t Earth-shattering features, but I appreciate Siemens’ restraint in not overpromising on AI that it isn’t ready to deliver (cf. Is Autodesk’s neural CAD worth getting excited about?)

There are also non-AI updates in Solid Edge 2026. I’m happy to see that there’s now a dark mode, an always-welcome accessibility feature, plus scalable SVG icons and redesigned command bars that should make for a nicer UI.

Solid Edge 2026 also has new features for sheet metal design, including the ability to apply etches directly to curved surfaces, automatic trimming on flanges across multiple edges, new wall thickness support, and a new automated tab and slot command.

Have you ever wanted to navigate your Solid Edge model with an Xbox controller? Solid Edge’s new walkthrough command lets you interact with your assembly as if it were a video game, allowing users to get up close and personal with their designs. You can also record your walkthroughs to quickly create animations.

The 2026 updates also apply to Designcenter X Solid Edge, the new name for Solid Edge X, which is a SaaS counterpart to Solid Edge that Siemens launched with the 2025 release.

You can see a demo of all these new features and more in Siemens’ introductory video for Solid Edge 2026:

Designcenter Solid Edge 2026 and Designcenter X Solid Edge 2026 are both now available.

Q&A with Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins

On last week’s Engineering Paper I wrote about Bentley’s slew of AI announcements at Year in Infrastructure 2025, which took place this month in Amsterdam.

While there I had the chance to sit down with Nicholas Cumins, Bentley’s CEO, to learn more about the company’s vision and plans for AI. Cumins spoke about why the digital thread is broken in the infrastructure industry, why business models are lagging behind technology, how engineering context is essential for AI, and more.

You can read my full Q&A with Cumins on Engineering.com: AI a “kick in the pants” for infrastructure sector, says Bentley CEO.

Quick hits

• Spatial has launched Analogue 26, the latest version of its Apple Vision Pro app for immersive design. The update adds support for the Logitech Muse, a stylus designed for the Vision Pro, allowing users to sketch and add annotations on top of 3D models. Spatial also released Analogue Portal 26, a companion iPhone app that allows users to collaborate in design reviews without requiring a Vision Pro headset.
• Concepts NREC announced the latest version of its Agile Engineering Design System, v2025.2. The turbomachinery design platform takes a new approach to volute modeling, adds integrations for CFD solvers including ADS Code LEO and Ansys CFX, introduces advanced tools for optimizing 5-axis machining toolpaths, and more.
• WestDev, developer of PCB design software Pulsonix, has announced a new integration between Pulsonix and Adam Research’s TRM analysis software for thermal risk management. The developer says the new integration “provides PCB designers with an efficient, data-consistent workflow for advanced thermal simulation and verification.”

One last link

Last week’s last link was to Design World senior editor Miles Budimir’s new column on engineering ethics. Not satisfied with one column, Miles has launched a second column focused on engineering disasters. Hopefully, readers of the first column can avoid being featured on the second.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post Designcenter Solid Edge 2026 launches with AI design copilot appeared first on Engineering.com.

Fitting, then, that Bentley chose Amsterdam as the site of its 2025 Year in Infrastructure event, an annual gathering of Bentley personnel, press, and prestige customers dedicated to infrastructure engineering.

Engineering.com was in Amsterdam last week to report on Bentley’s many software announcements. You can read the news and analysis in Bentley bets big on AI for infrastructure.

We also had the chance to sit down with Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins, the first leader of the company who doesn’t share its name (in 2024 he succeeded longtime CEO Greg Bentley, the eldest of the five Bentley brothers and current executive chair of the board).

We spoke with Cumins about his vision for Bentley Systems, the challenges facing the infrastructure industry, how AI could be transformative for design and engineering, and the news he’s most excited about from YII 2025 (hint: it’s not any of the software announcements).

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Engineering.com: What is your vision for Bentley Systems?

Nicholas Cumins: Bentley is the infrastructure engineering software company. We offer software for pretty much all the engineering disciplines that are involved in designing and engineering infrastructure assets across industries, from transportation to electric utilities to the water network. We have the deepest, broadest portfolio of applications for infrastructure engineering, and we cover the full lifecycle from design to construction to operations.

Our greater vision here is how do you actually connect these phases of the lifecycle, from design to construction to operations and back to design? It’s very rare that you’re going to develop infrastructure in a vacuum. There are always existing assets. You want to keep all of that as context when you design potential new infrastructure or repurpose existing infrastructure.

So we want to make sure we can connect the loop from design to construction to operations back to design, so that we understand how designs have been performing over time to influence future designs going forward.

If that’s the vision, what’s the reality today?

The full feedback loop is still something that the industry is working towards. The truth of the industry is that the digital thread is broken.

When it goes from design to construction, it’s very often the case that if it’s a different firm in charge of construction, it’s actually going to recreate its own plans, its own models, to then move forward with the construction process. And it’s very often the case that the infrastructure assets, once they’re delivered, are being delivered with a lot of files, with a lot of data, with lots of simulation and analysis. But all of that data is going to go completely stale, and will reflect how the infrastructure asset was once it was delivered, but not how the infrastructure is at any point in time. And there is very rarely a feedback loop from the performance of the assets back to the original design.

So creating this digital thread is very much an endeavor for the entire industry. Organizations that do design-build will already make sure that there is a great digital thread that goes from planning all the way to the handover of the asset, so you will see pockets of that. But as an industry overall, I think it’s fair to say this is very much still ahead of us.

What do you see as the solution to that problem? Is it technological?

It’s technological potentially. I will say this is probably the easiest part, because we can do that already. It’s primarily the business models that need to evolve.

Engineering firms very often are charging time and material. They’re not charging based on the performance of the asset. So they don’t really have an incentive to be able to maintain that digital thread all the way to performance and back. So those are more fundamental things that need to be tackled.

Engineering firms have been talking about this for 100 years. There was one CEO who told me he found a whitepaper from the 1920s that was talking about moving to value based pricing for engineering services.

But interestingly, AI, because it’s changing the fundamental dynamics, it’s changing how value is being created. It might be the kick in the pants which is needed for the infrastructure sector overall to move to such business models.

How do you see AI impacting the infrastructure sector today?

We’re actually at the beginning of AI, and already we see amazing productivity gains. Some of the ones I quoted yesterday in the keynote were 60%, 80% productivity gains. So this is huge. It could be even more.

On the question of whether we replace engineers, we really don’t see that happening anytime soon in our space, because of what’s at stake here. There needs to be an organization that guarantees the designs that have been created, that can vouch for how reliable these designs are. And when they do that, they engage their liability. So we don’t see AI completely replacing engineers anytime soon.

What we do see is AI automating big parts of what the engineers are doing. And we see AI also making recommendations—not decisions, recommendations—to engineers. Things are moving so fast with AI, but a recent development we’ve seen is a clear acceleration of engineering firms who are using our applications to give feedback to the AI agents that they have created. So they will tap into our structural analysis software to see whether this is reliable from a structural standpoint. They will tap into our geotechnical software. They will tap into our hydraulics and hydrology software in order to get that kind of feedback.

We call that the engineering context. This is what AI needs in order to come up with appropriate recommendations. So we see our engineering applications providing engineering context to AI to make sure that AI is going to come up with appropriate recommendations.

How is Bentley planning to equip users with AI?

It’s a priority across our entire product organization. You will see AI in our core engineering applications. You will see AI coming up in Connect, a new set of capabilities as part of Bentley Infrastructure Cloud. And this is all about information management, data management and collaboration. You see AI also being developed into our offering for subsurface analysis called Seequent. So you see AI throughout our portfolio.

And then there’s something we haven’t really discussed so far, which is not just design and construction, but operations and maintenance. We have an entire offering dedicated to creating analytics on existing assets, which is all powered by AI. So it’s using computer vision, for example, to understand the exact physical condition of an existing asset and its full context. It’s using AI to detect if there’s something like some vegetation growing, or some electric poles which could be a danger. Is there a crack? Is there spalling on a bridge? And leveraging our own engineering applications to understand what that means from an engineering standpoint. Is there going to be a fire hazard here, a structural integrity issue? Do we need to do some remediation work? So this offering is called Bentley Asset Analytics, and it’s all leveraging AI.

Could you tell us more about the Bentley Copilot?

Bentley Copilot is an AI assistant that we have created in the context of our very first AI powered application for site engineering. And now we’re deploying it across our portfolio of engineering applications, as well as Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, the capabilities we offer for data management and collaboration.

So it’s the same assistant, and there is an interesting abstraction layer underneath it where we can swap from one LLM to another. We’re not dependent on any particular LLM, and I think we’ve swapped it already a couple of times.

Can users pick the LLM that they want to use?

No, this is transparent to them. Users sometimes create their own AI assistants, and what we do is offer them the interface needed so that their AI assistant can interact with our applications directly, or can interact with Bentley Infrastructure Cloud directly. Whenever they do this, obviously they pick whatever LLM they want.

How are your customers using their own AI tools with Bentley software?

The big engineering firms are creating AI assistants to help their engineers get information fast. And they could use that instead of our own copilot. We welcome that, even for simple things like our own documentation.

If you go on docs.bentley.com, you can interact with a chatbot. The same chatbot actually offers an MCP interface, the model context protocol, which is becoming a bit of a de facto standard for interfaces for AI. It was created by Anthropic and everybody is adopting it. We did this because we have a lot of engineering firms who wanted their assistants to be able to tap into the documentation. That’s a simple example.

Besides creating those MCP interfaces, there are two ways we’re fundamentally helping these engineering firms. One is helping them tap into their past project data that they’ve put into Bentley Infrastructure Cloud. In whatever file format that data is, whether it’s Bentley or not, we help them map that data into schemas. It’s called the base infrastructure schema. Suddenly that data is query-able, it’s searchable, and it’s ready to be picked up by AI. Basically, we give them technology that they can then use in order to access data, which can be decades old.

And the other way we’re helping them, which I think is the most profound, is our own engineering applications providing feedback to their AI. They’ve been trusting these applications for decades, they’re very established. STAAD, our application for structural analysis, is the gold standard application for structural engineering. PLS [Power Line Systems] is the same for transmission towers, and so on and so forth. So we have this deep and broad portfolio of engineering applications, and the big engineering firms now want not just infrastructure professionals to interact with those applications, they want AI also to interact with those applications.

So yesterday we announced that we have a co-innovation initiative to discuss very openly with those firms what APIs we have right now and how we need to evolve those APIs to help solve their use cases. And to what extent we also need to continue to evolve the architecture of our applications so that they can be queried by AI as cloud services as opposed to desktop software. Because right now, those are primarily desktop applications.

And also, how do we need to evolve our own commercial models to make sure that, with all the value that will be created, all these productivity gains that are going to be generated for the engineering firms leveraging AI, we can capture our fair share of the value. Because everything, whether it’s our architecture, our commercial models, everything right now is designed for individual infrastructure professionals to use our applications. And now we’re talking about something completely different.

Will Bentley Copilot be available across the Bentley portfolio?

Yes, you see it in all the next generation applications. So OpenSite+, Substation+ and Synchro+. The plus indicates it’s a new generation. There is a previous generation that still exists, but at some point, once it’s fully replaced, we’ll just drop the plus.

But then we also showed how we’re bringing the same copilot capabilities within established applications such as OpenRoads or OpenRail. We’ve shown how we’re embedding it into Bentley Infrastructure Cloud for the search capabilities, for example. Say you’re in ProjectWise as part of Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, for example, and you want to search past project data. You will actually interact with the Bentley Copilot.

What makes the next generation applications next gen? Is it just the addition of AI?

They are powered by AI, but their fundamental architecture is also quite different, because they all organize around a digital twin. And by that, what we mean is the data that is being created, instead of being created into an engineering file, whatever file format you pick, the data is being created into a digital twin. It’s persisted as a digital twin, which is cloud based, so it’s in the cloud.

And that allows multiple engineers to work together at the same time on the same project. So take Substation, for example. You will see engineers representing different disciplines who can work concurrently on the design of a new substation.

Do you have a timeline on transitioning the rest of the portfolio to the next generation?

No, we pace it because we don’t want to create too much disruption. For civil engineering we started with site engineering, because that’s typically how a project starts. Design the site first, and then you can go and design the data center, for example.

And then we went after substation, because we thought this is where there is the most acute need for concurrent engineering. There’s such big demand for electricity. The electric grid has to be upgraded. There’s a need for way more substations than we have right now, and there’s a lot of work to be done. Substation engineers cannot afford to be just waiting. So that’s why we went after that.

Probably the last applications that are going to be re-platformed are those very established applications such as OpenRoads and OpenRail. That’s why, instead of waiting, we decided to bring some AI capabilities into those, even though they’re still fundamentally file based applications.

You said a few times at this event that you won’t use your customers’ data to train AI. Why do you feel it’s important to emphasize that point?

It’s a matter of principle. It’s wrong to use the IP of one engineering firm to train AI that will benefit other engineering firms. It’s just wrong.

The same way that we are making really sure that when we use AI internally to help our developers, that our code doesn’t start to train AI that can benefit other software vendors. So it’s really a matter of principle.

I can tell you, however, that it is top of mind for engineering firms themselves. They are very concerned about their IP, their data, being used to train AI of other software vendors. And sometimes there’s also unclarity on who owns the IP. Sometimes it’s them, sometimes it’s their clients. So sometimes they’re not even allowed for that data to be used to train AI even if they wanted it to.

So we made it very clear that we will not use the data of our users, whether they are engineering firms or owner-operators, to train our own AI, unless they explicitly permit us to do so.

Which announcement are you most excited about from this year’s YII?

In a funny way, it might not be any of the software announcements. It would be this AI co-innovation initiative. I’m just in awe when I look at what engineering services firms, owner-operators are doing right now with AI and the possibilities that it opens up. I am just in awe. So I’m very much looking forward to those conversations about how we can help even more by evolving, especially our engineering applications.

The post AI a “kick in the pants” for infrastructure sector, says Bentley CEO appeared first on Engineering.com.

Bentley System’s annual Year in Infrastructure (YII) event took place last week in Amsterdam, capping off with the presentation of Bentley’s 2025 Going Digital awards for innovation in infrastructure.

There was a particular theme to the event that won’t surprise anyone.

“It’s clear we are at the threshold of a generational shift in infrastructure. Just as CAD and 3D modeling transformed engineering decades ago, AI is redefining how the next generation of infrastructure professionals will work,” Nicholas Cumins, Bentley’s CEO, said in his opening keynote.

Bentley announced a new generation of “AI-enabled” applications starting with OpenSite+ for civil site design. Bentley first announced OpenSite+ last year, but it has now moved from early access (“basically beta,” according to Cumins in a press briefing) to limited availability (“that software can be used in production”). The final step is general availability, but Bentley didn’t say when it expects that for OpenSite+.

Joining OpenSite+ in Bentley’s next-gen lineup are the newly announced OpenUtilities Substation+ for substation design, which will enter early access in November, and Synchro+ for construction planning and coordination, which will enter early access in December.

One of the AI features available in the next-gen products is the Bentley Copilot, an integrated AI assistant. I saw a brief but intriguing demo of Bentley Copilot at YII 2025, which goes beyond product support by actually interacting with models (e.g. “change the parking angle to 60 degrees” in OpenSite+).

Cumins told me that the Bentley Copilot is built on commercial LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT or Claude), but it’s not dependent on any particular one; Bentley can switch to whichever model provides the best performance as they all strive to outdo one another (“I think we’ve swapped it already a couple times,” Cumins said). The underlying LLM is not user-selectable.

Bentley’s next-gen applications aren’t only defined by their embrace of AI, Cumins told me. “Their fundamental architecture is also quite different, because they’re all organized around a digital twin,” he said. Part of what that means is that the new applications are fully cloud-based, opening the door to modern software capabilities such as multiple users working on the same project concurrently. Indeed, Bentley showed off just that capability in Substation+.

In a final piece of AI news, which Cumins told me was his favorite of the YII 2025 announcements, Bentley is launching an infrastructure AI co-innovation initiative to collaborate with engineering firms on the best way to bring AI to the industry.

“I’m very much looking forward to those conversations about how we can help even more,” Cumins said.

I’ll be publishing my Q&A with Cumins soon, so stay tuned for more from Bentley’s CEO.

Cesium is spreading

Another big thread at YII 2025 was the continuing integration of Cesium into the Bentley portfolio. Cesium, which Bentley acquired last year, develops technology for visualizing geospatial data.

“Cesium, pretty quickly, is getting integrated into many of our products that have a geospatial context, as a default thing that you can use when you’re designing, building, or operating infrastructure,” Patrick Cozzi, the founder of Cesium and now Bentley’s chief platform officer, told me.

For example, Bentley added support for 3D Tiles (an open standard developed by Cesium) into MicroStation 2025, the latest version of Bentley’s CAD software for infrastructure design. Cesium is also the geospatial engine for Infrastructure Cloud Connect, a new hub for navigating projects and assets that Bentley announced in Amsterdam.

Bentley also announced that it’s adding reality modeling services from iTwin Capture to Cesium ion, Cesium’s SaaS platform for optimizing and streaming geospatial data. That means Cesium ion will be able to create meshes, point clouds, and Gaussian splats from imagery and integrate it with other sources of data in the 3D Tiles format.

And then there’s iTwin Engage, a new platform that “blends iTwin, Cesium, Unreal Engine, and open standards to let teams and communities step inside projects before they’re built.” Currently in early access (read: beta), iTwin Engage allows users to develop 3D visualizations of their projects that stay up to date with a live connection to the project’s digital twin.

“iTwin Engage is built on Unreal Engine,” Cozzi told me, “so it brings all the game tech, that really amazing viz. It’s built on the Cesium plugin for Unreal Engine to bring in the geospatial context. Then it’s built on iTwin APIs that bring in design models, which are then converted to 3D Tiles.”

The Year in Infrastructure 2025 Going Digital Awards

And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Bentley’s 2025 Going Digital Awards. Several people described the ceremony to me, a first-time attendee, as “the Oscars of infrastructure.” It was, indeed, a swanky affair. I chose the beef and the “optional” in black tie optional.

Here are the 2025 Going Digital awards winners:

• Bridges and Tunnels: Italferr S.p.A. (Italy) – Leveraging Digital Technologies for Improved Infrastructure Management
• Cities, Campuses, and Facilities: Voyants Solutions Private Ltd. (India) – Preparation of Masterplan, Detailed Design and Project Management of Atal Puram Township, Agra, India
• Construction: Deloitte and Vale (Brazil) – SYNCHRO 4D Powering the World’s First Iron Ore Briquetting Plant
• Energy Production: Baosteel Engineering & Technology Group Co., Ltd. (China) – Digital Intelligent Construction Project for a Steel Plant Based on Bentley Technology
• Geospatial and Reality Modeling: Al Madinah Region Development Authority (MDA) (Saudi Arabia) – Manarah Urban Data Platform
• Project Delivery: Egis (France) – Canal Seine Nord Europe
• Rail and Transit: PT Kereta Api Indonesia (Persero) (Indonesia) – Smart Infrastructure by KAI & AssetWise Linear Analytics
• Roads and Highways: Jabatan Kerja Raya Sarawak (JKRS) (Malaysia) – Sarawak Sabah Link Road Phase 2
• Structural Engineering: AVS Engineers | ISID Architect, Nikhil Mahashur and Associates, Structural Engineer – Siddharth Sharma (India) – Fairmont Udaipur Palace
• Subsurface Modeling and Analysis: Fervo Energy (United States) – Cape Station
• Transmission and Distribution: China Energy Engineering Group Guangxi Electric Power Design Institute Co., Ltd. (China) – Application of GIS+BIM Digital Intelligence Technology to the Entire Lifecycle of China Southern Power Grid’s Guangxi Nanning 500kV Power Transmission and Transformation Project
• Water and Wastewater: PT Wika Tirta Jaya Jatiluhur (WTJJ) (Indonesia) – SPAM Regional Jatiluhur I: Transforming Water for a Better Tomorrow

Congratulations to all the winners.

In other news, three 2026 releases

• Altair has released HPCWorks 2026, the latest version of its high performance computing platform. HPCWorks 2026 has new features including advanced GPU integration, expanded AI and machine learning tools, and extended reporting, according to Altair.
• CAD developer IronCAD has released IronCAD 2026. Among other upgrades, IronCAD 2026 adds multiple application window support, general modeling and drawing improvements, and an enhanced AI chatbot.
• Allplan has launched a new version of its BIM software, Allplan 2026. Like Graphisoft Archicad 29, which I wrote about last week, Allplan 2026 features the AI assistant that parent company Nemetschek Group announced back in January.

One last link

Engineering.com sister publication Design World has launched a new monthly column devoted to engineering ethics. It’s penned by senior editor Miles Budimir, who’s been teaching the subject to engineering students for nearly two decades. Read Miles’ kickoff column on Design World: Ethical Engineering: A new monthly column.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post Bentley bets big on AI for infrastructure appeared first on Engineering.com.

Bentley’s annual Year in Infrastructure (YII) event is taking place this week in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I’ll be there for Engineering.com to learn more about the future of infrastructure, or at the very least eat some herring.

If you’re at the show and want to say hi, drop me a line at malba@wtwhmedia.com.

I’ll bring you more on Bentley YII 2025 next week. In the meantime, here’s a rundown of the latest software news.

Onshape’s AI Advisor, now in Onshape

PTC announced that Onshape AI Advisor, the support chatbot for its cloud CAD platform, is now integrated directly in Onshape. When AI Advisor launched in beta earlier this year, users could only find it in the Onshape learning center (where it remains available.)

Besides its location, not much else has changed for Onshape AI Advisor. It’s still marked with a beta tag. It’s still available to all Onshape users, including free users. Users with Professional or Enterprise plans will have a new option to disable it (it’s disabled by default for Enterprise users).

An Onshape blog post about the change emphasizes that the integrated AI Advisor does not have access to any user data.

“Embedding AI Advisor directly into Onshape marks a new era of design intelligence,” David Katzman, executive vice president and general manager of Onshape and Arena at PTC, said in the press release. “We’re not just shipping AI features. We’re shaping an engineering culture where AI is a trusted partner in the design process. As the industry’s only cloud-native CAD and PDM platform, Onshape is positioned to lead the industry with integrating AI into product development.”

Graphisoft launches Archicad 29 with AI assistant

In similar news, BIM developer Graphisoft has announced Archicad 29, the latest version of its architectural design software. The update includes, among other new features, a beta of a built-in AI assistant that Graphisoft calls “a smart design partner” that “guides users through Archicad’s features and helps keep projects on track.”

Nemetschek Group, Graphisoft’s parent company, announced plans for this AI assistant back in January. In the Archicad 29 announcement, Graphisoft says it expects a full commercial release of the AI assistant in 2026 across its entire software portfolio.

“Archicad 29 is the centerpiece in our Design Intelligence Strategy, and the backbone of the next generation of AI-enabled workflows and a superior user experience,” said Graphisoft chief product officer Márton Kiss in the company’s announcement.

One last link

Is Autodesk due for yet another licensing shakeup? Monica Schnitger reports on Autodesk’s recent investor event and the potential changes in Autodesk wants you to pay for outcomes, not just access.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

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Flux, a browser-based ECAD tool, today launched what it says “could be the biggest advance in hardware since the invention of CAD.”

With such a grandiose claim, you already know it’s an AI something-or-other. In this case, it’s “agentic AI capabilities that can design circuit boards and source components based on simple natural language prompts.”

Flux, which launched its platform in 2023, already had an AI copilot that could answer user questions. With today’s announcement, the company says it’s reached a new level of AI capabilities that “effectively make it a junior hardware engineer.”

“Just describe what you need, and Flux handles the rest. It analyzes the prompt, breaks it up into a plan, researches part pricing and availability, generates a schematic diagram, connects the nets, and routes the board,” reads Flux’s press release.

An AI that can design PCBs sounds awesome, but I’ve heard this song before. I’m still waiting for SnapMagic Copilot, announced two years ago, to amount to anything other than a beta waitlist. Ditto for Cadstrom, a startup that announced $6.8 million in seed funding last December for an AI-based PCB validation tool. That has yet to materialize (and its website barely meets the definition of placeholder).

That’s not to say Flux won’t flourish where others have floundered. I’ll be speaking with CEO Matthias Wagner in a couple weeks to learn more, so stay tuned for further coverage.

In the meantime, if you’ve used Flux and want to share your thoughts, reach out to me at malba@wtwhmedia.com.

Bananaz launches AI Design Agent

Another week, another AI copilot for mechanical engineers.

Bananaz has launched Bananaz Design Agent, an AI agent that can analyze CAD files and drawings to provide feedback and answer user questions.

“It’s a collaborative platform that helps you to get a better design… think about it like a senior engineer that sits next to you and provides you all the insights,” Or Israel, co-founder and CEO of Bananaz, told me on an introductory call a few weeks ago.

Here are some sample questions Bananaz says users can ask the Design Agent:

• What DFM issues should I address before manufacturing?
• Can I replace any custom parts with shelf components?
• Perform a tolerance analysis and identify unnecessarily tight tolerances.
• I need general improvements—what do you recommend?
• How should I update my drawing to comply with the company standards?

Israel told me that Bananaz is web-based and that it currently has add-ins for Solidworks and Creo. “Our goal is to be able to provide value for every CAD software and to be agnostic completely,” he said.

Bananaz is built on top of several commercial LLMs, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic Claude. Users can choose which model to use, which Israel says makes it easier for companies with existing AI policies to get stay compliant. I wondered which model worked best.

“Currently, our best results are with Claude,” Israel told me.

Interesting. But I still had one question: Why Bananaz?

“Because Apple was already taken,” Israel replied.

AI rendering goes full steam ahead

Depix, a generative AI rendering developer, has a new product called Depix ImageLab. The online tool lets users upload images to generate photorealistic product renders from text prompts. It works with anything from pencil sketches to CAD screenshots to existing renders.

I took ImageLab for a test drive and wrote about the experience in Is this generative AI rendering tool a “KeyShot killer”?

When I shared the article with Depix CEO Philip Lunn, he wrote back to highlight one advantage of ImageLab that I didn’t make explicit in the piece. I’ll allow him to do so here:

“[A] key differentiator to Keyshot and all other traditional renderers… is [these] are “renderings” without the 3d model. Any screen shot or sketch leads to photographic realism. So the interim step of cad data translation and tessellation and materialization and lighting etc is all gone,” Lunn wrote.

Check out the article for more details, including how to try ImageLab for free.

Quick hits

• Engineering.com sister publication Design World has released its October 2025 issue focused on diversity in engineering. Click the link to read a digital copy of the magazine. The stories are also featured on Engineering.com’s EDI (engineering diversity and inclusion) section, including a profile I wrote of manufacturing engineer Fernando Sarmiento with some great advice for young engineers.
• MathWorks has launched a new generative AI assistant, Matlab Copilot, that will be available in the latest release of Matlab and Simulink (R2025b). It will answer user questions, suggest code predictions, generate tests and more.
• PTC announced that its cloud CAD platform Onshape is now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. “This launch enables customers to easily discover, purchase, and deploy the Onshape cloud-native CAD solution through a simplified procurement process while benefiting from consolidated billing and retiring their annual AWS commitments,” said AWS’s Michael Choe in PTC’s press release.
• Datakit has updated its CAD converters to version 2025.4, adding reading support for Creo up to version 12.0, Fusion up to version 2603.1.52, NX up to 2506.4000, and Parasolid up to version 38.0, among other updates.

One last link

Engineering.com senior editor Ian Wright describes his impressions from the 2025 Canadian Manufacturing Technology Show in Additive manufacturing, eh?

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

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When Lunn reached out recently about Depix’s latest project, ImageLab, he took the hyperbole even further.

“Last year we made designers cry. This year we will make them cry and fall out of their chair and shout with elation,” he wrote in an email.

If you’re the crying type, consider yourself warned. Here’s a hands-on look at Depix ImageLab and what it can do.

What is Depix ImageLab?

Depix ImageLab is a web-based tool for generating AI images. You’ve probably already used something similar. But ImageLab explicitly targets professionals, like product designers, looking for high quality renders.

“What we’re doing is making it very simple to generate really high quality images from anywhere,” Lunn told Engineering.com during a demo of ImageLab.

“Anywhere,” Lunn specified, could be “from a very early sketch, to a polished CAD image from any CAD manufacturer. It doesn’t matter what the CAD input is. It could be architecture, it could be products. It could be a circuit board. It could be a widget. Doesn’t matter. It just makes a great marketing photo.”

Anyone can sign up for an account at DepixImageLab.com to get 10 free credits. Each generated image costs 1 credit. You can also create five second videos for 9 credits apiece, though we didn’t test that feature.

When you sign up, this is what you’ll see:

The interface is self-explanatory. You start by importing an image (or picking a sample), and then you tell ImageLab what to do to it. If you don’t feel like typing a prompt, you can hit the glowing Voice button to dictate one instead. You can also attach other images to reference in your prompt, like an image of a texture you want to apply to the target image (we’ll show an example of that later).

Let’s see how it works.

Depix ImageLab in action

For our first foray with ImageLab, we picked one of the available sample images, a sketch of a car:

A designer might want to see what a real version of this car would look like—so we asked ImageLab to generate one.

Prompt: Turn this sketch into a photorealistic rendering on a desert highway.

After about 30 seconds of processing, Depix ImageLab generated this image:

Once you’ve generated an image, ImageLab provides a toolbar that lets you save it, crop it, compare it to the original image, select a specific region to manipulate in your next prompt, and apply other adjustments. There’s also an extensive gallery of presets that will apply automatic prompts to your image (more on that later).

Let’s try again. Here’s the image we just generated, with a new prompt being applied:

Prompt: Change the color of the car to matte black with red accents.

Prompt: Change the angle of the camera so that the car is viewed from the front, and change the car’s color to blue.

Prompt: Change the background to Times Square, and put a crowd of gawking admirers around the car. And change the color of the car to red.

Prompt: Put the camera inside the car so we can see the scene from the driver’s perspective.

ImageLab, like other generative AI tools, doesn’t always give you the result you’re expecting. In this instance, rather than giving us an inside view of the original car, ImageLab has instead put us behind the wheel of a second car.

Perhaps a better prompt would have made a difference. To see what might have been, we reverted to the previous image and used the “Enhance prompt” button to give us a helping hand.

Original prompt: Put the camera inside the car so we can see the scene from the driver’s perspective.

Enhanced prompt: First-person driver’s view through a car windshield during sunset, showing the steering wheel and dashboard lit by orange light.

The same problem persists, but at least there’s an orange glow.

We could keep trying increasingly specific prompts, as Lunn did throughout his demo when unexpected problems arose. It’s easy to get lost in a generative rabbit hole, playing with prompts until every pixel is perfect. So we’ll restrain ourselves to two final examples of ImageLab.

Let’s go back to the original sketch of the car and apply one of ImageLab’s built-in presets: Amalfi Coast.

Prompt (added automatically): Place this car on the Amalfi Coast in Italy with dramatic coastal cliffs, Mediterranean sea views, colorful Italian villages, and coastal road atmosphere while adhering to the shape and position of the car as close as possible while adhering to the original image

To demonstrate how ImageLab uses reference images, we uploaded this image:

Prompt: Apply the texture in the attached image to the car.

Is Depix ImageLab a “KeyShot killer”?

We’ve shown off several examples of ImageLab’s capabilities, and you can freely test them for yourself.

What’s obvious from even limited testing is that the AI tool varies in the quality of its output. It can quickly create impressive renders from hasty sketches, and it’s adept at adjusting certain elements of a picture—like colors—without affecting others. But it can also misinterpret prompts and create odd images that don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Like all AI tools, ImageLab can be good, bad and ugly. That’s AI for you; sorting the results is up to the user. But crucially, it’s incredibly fast and easy to use.

“We’re trying to be the thing for product designers and product marketers and CAD users… who really would love to be able to make a nice image, but just can’t invest the time in learning all the settings and tweaks you have to do for rendering,” Lunn said.

Lunn has plenty of experience with the settings and tweaks of traditional rendering, having previously founded a company called Bunkspeed which sold a rendering program called Hypershot. In 2010 Hypershot was taken over by Luxion and rebranded as KeyShot. It remains a popular rendering program to this day.

With AI-based rendering, is the writing on the wall for KeyShot and other traditional rendering programs?

We asked Thomas Teger, former VP of marketing for KeyShot and a former colleague of Lunn’s at Bunkspeed.

“While you can create truly amazingly realistic images with KeyShot, it requires a significant amount of skills and expertise with the tool itself, and even then it takes often a long time to get to the final image,” Teger said.

Uneven as it may be, generative AI requires no expertise and barely any time.

“ImageLab is a tool that lets you create images and movies the way you “think” about it, not based on what is available to your or how well you master various tool sets… I firmly believe that this will be the product that has the potential of becoming the “KeyShot Killer” as it redefines rendering as we all know it in a completely new way,” Teger said.

(Teger describes himself as an “independent advisor” to Depix. He’s not paid by the company, but he receives free credits “in return for cool content, testing, insight and promotion.”)

It should be noted that if there is writing on the wall, KeyShot has also read it. The company offers AI-based rendering features of its own through a product called KeyShot Studio AI.

What’s the cost of Depix ImageLab?

Creating AI images can be addictive. And with the ever-present element of randomness, it’s necessarily iterative. You’ll quickly burn through your 10 free credits.

When you do, you can top them up at $19.95 for a pack of 250. That works out to eight cents an image, though Lunn said Depix is still debating the right pricing model.

“This whole thing costs quite a bit to run, you know, plus all the labor and humans and all involved… you can get it as low as pennies per image, basically,” Lunn said. “It depends on the use case and the user.”

Regardless, Lunn has no doubt that ImageLab and its ilk represent a radical change. The AI tool can do near instantly what used to require highly valued software skills. At one point our conversation turned to Adobe Photoshop, the pre-eminent photo manipulation software. Lunn reflected that professional Photoshop users used to earn hundreds of dollars per hour for their professional services.

“But now,” Lunn said, “for 25 cents, you can make a perfect marketing image.”

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Leo AI, developer of a mechanical engineering AI assistant, has announced a new partnership with TraceParts, an online library of part catalogs and 3D models.

According to Leo AI, the goal of the partnership is to make it fast and easy for engineers to find the right parts.

“Instead of juggling filters,” the press release says, “engineers can simply type: ‘Find me a ball bearing with a 25 mm inner diameter, a lifespan of 10,000 cycles, and a speed of 8,000 RPM.’”

Leo AI’s so-called large mechanical model (LMM) will interpret the request, ask the user for clarification if necessary, and retrieve matching results from TraceParts. Here’s a quick video demo from Leo AI:

Last week I wrote about Leo AI completing a $5 million seed funding round. I gave an overview of the company’s AI platform based on an interview with co-founder and CEO Maor Farid, who told me that Leo could, among other capabilities, search through online catalogs to find parts for a given design (a spring for a suspension system, in his example).

“Leo looks for both online vendor catalogs and on your PLM, and it provides the springs that match the parameters that you specified or Leo calculated,” Farid said.

So what’s new here? I asked Farid to clarify how the TraceParts partnership will change Leo’s capabilities. This is his emailed response:

“Leo has always combined two things: doing the calculations to figure out exactly which part is needed, and then searching across PLM or vendor catalogs to find it.

What’s new with TraceParts is the scale and reliability it brings. Instead of searching across scattered catalogs, engineers now have direct access to one of the world’s largest, supplier-certified libraries – 112M+ parts and 2,100 catalogs – right inside Leo.

So the core capability isn’t new, but this partnership makes it far more powerful: faster searches, fewer mistakes, and much more confidence that you’ve got the right part. That’s why we’re so excited about it.”

Top Workplaces for Engineers 2026

In case you missed it in last week’s lengthy newsletter, Engineering.com is hosting its second annual Top Workplaces for Engineers program, and nominations are now open.

Here’s more from Engineering.com Editor-in-Chief Rachael Pasini:

“To be eligible, participating companies must employ at least 35 engineers or have an engineering workforce comprising 10% or more of their total workforce. The award is based on employee feedback captured by the confidential, research-backed Energage Workplace Survey. Participating companies will be evaluated against the industry’s most robust benchmarks based on more than 18 years of culture research.  

The award will honor companies that create exceptional workplace environments for engineering professionals across various industries, and we will publish the list of winners in the spring of 2026.

If you believe you work at a company that deserves such recognition and meets the criteria, nominate them at: engineering.com/topworkplaces. The nomination period runs through mid-January, but submit your nomination much sooner, before the busy end-of-year season kicks in with full force.”

3D Systems updates its software strategy

3D printing hardware and software developer 3D Systems has decided to double down on its proprietary polymer platform, 3D Sprint, and back off from its vendor agnostic software, Oqton Manufacturing Operating System and 3DXpert.

Why? Engineering.com senior editor Ian Wright weighs in with the unsurprising answer:

“If you’re going to talk about software these days, it seems to be a requirement that you use the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ at least once… That certainly holds true for the latest announcement from 3D Systems, which led the press release that it would be selling off its Oqton Manufacturing Operating System (MOS) and 3DXpert business by emphasizing its decision to focus on its proprietary polymer software 3D Sprint as a response to ‘the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in additive manufacturing.’”

There’s more to the story than just AI, so check out Ian’s full article on Engineering.com: 3D Systems shifts its software strategy to focus on 3D Sprint.

One last link

For a long read on how engineering and design software could be rebuilt around AI, check out Patrick Hebron’s essay An All-Around Better Horse: AI and the Revolution in Design, Engineering, and Problem-Solving Methodology.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

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