Today marks a milestone in how the industry works. Virtual Companions — Aura, Leo, and Marie — are now globally available on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform SaaS, in the Age of Industrial AI.
More than AI assistants, Virtual Companions are trusted experts who embody decades of industrial knowledge and know-how. They understand your intent, reason with Industry World Models grounded in the laws of physics and materials science, and orchestrate actions across the full lifecycle of your products — helping you see the invisible and achieve the impossible, before anything physically exists.
This is not about adding AI to your tools. It's a new kind of teamwork — humans and Virtual Companions co-creating, safely and at scale, on your most complex challenges.
The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform integrates AI-driven Virtual Companions and Generative Experiences—to boost efficiency and accelerate innovation.
But what are a Virtual Companions and Generative Experiences?
Virtual Companions and Generative Experiences help you complete and automate activities reliably, from analyzing technical data, to generating deliverables, to solving complex engineering problems.
Virtual Companions
Virtual Companions are the AI-powered virtual workforce of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform SaaS.
They reason, plan, and act to address complex industrial problems and interact with you through natural conversations.
Each Virtual Companion has a specific mission, accomplished thru Competencies, and a distinct personality.
Competencies are the ability, to perform a particular job or purpose. A Competency covers an entire domain of expertise, relying on more granular skills. Virtual Companions embody Competences. For example, AURA project management or LEO Mechanical Engineering.
There are three distinct Virtual Companions:
| AURA - the Business Expert Empowers any user by leveraging Enterprise Knowledge & Know-How |
LEO - The Engineer Effectively solve technical challenges in all engineering disciplines | |
MARIE - The Scientist Bring Deep Scientific Knowledge to Engineers or Researchers |
Generative Experiences
Generative Experiences leverage Industry Knowledge & Know-How to robotize industrial processes.
They create or enrich Virtual Twins, while ensuring quality and compliance with industry and enterprise standards
Generative Experiences handle complex and repetitive tasks efficiently, improving the overall operational efficiency of users, teams, and organizations.
By taking on lower-value tasks, they enable users, teams, and organizations to to focus on creative, strategic, and high-value work, fostering innovation.
SIMULIA Generative Experiences combine validated, world-class physics solvers with AI — seamlessly embedded within enterprise design environments, not bolted on as a separate tool. By tapping into your organization's own enterprise knowledge and engineering know-how, they empower designers and engineers, experts and non-experts alike, to design and optimize next-generation, high-performance products with confidence grounded in physics, not just approximation.
Trained on real and synthetic data (V+R) — combining physical test data with high-fidelity synthetic data, to expand the design window but also use the best of previous designs, to build more robust, generalizable physics behavior models
Deep intimacy with designer intent — capturing not just geometry and performance, but the designer's underlying goals and constraints, speeding up time to an optimized design.
Fused with the design iteration loop — physics-informed feedback delivered directly within the designer's natural workflow, not as a separate step.
High fidelity physics throughout — maintaining simulation-grade accuracy even as speed and accessibility increase.
This is central to SIMULIA's vision: extending AI-driven solutions and Virtual Twins across the full engineering lifecycle — making processes smarter and more adaptive, and putting the power of physics-based simulation in the hands of every user.
And because every discipline works differently, each Virtual Companion comes with Competencies designed for the way you work. Here's what this means for YOU:
Virtual Companion Competencies
| Moment 1: LEO | Design Performance Analysis | |
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| Challenge Designers and Design Engineers still rely on their own experience and trial-and-error to configure simulation setups, often without deep expertise in advanced physics tools. Simulation workflows have a steep learning curve, and enterprise best practices are rarely embedded into the process itself — they live in people's heads or scattered documentation instead. As a result, converting design goals and KPIs into properly configured simulations requires significant manual effort, with little guided automation or contextual intelligence to assist along the way. This leads to inefficiencies, delays, and frustration, slowing down design decisions and increasing the risk of errors and rework Solution LEO Design Performance Analysis empowers you with advanced physics insight through intuitive natural-language interaction across structures and motion disciplines. It generates design performance insights and physics KPIs, transforming simulation setup and results exploration into a guided, conversational experience that flags what matters in the results and helps engineers configure the right simulation for the question they're asking. By leveraging best-practice knowledge and natural-language interaction, LEO Design Performance Analysis lowers the barrier to simulation expertise, enabling engineers, regardless of prior simulation experience, to set up, run, and analyze simulation results with confidence. Benefit
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| Moment 2: LEO | Design Performance Analysis | |
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| Challenge In complex simulation tasks, just managing the model and results can be a significant undertaking. Users need AI to handle complexity and perform tasks automatically, streamlining the process for users and allowing them to focus on more important work. But to do this, the AI needs access to all the relevant data and context in one place. Solution With a few typed natural language prompts, LEO can answer questions about the model, change the visualization and help the user to validate the simulation scenario. Users can explore and manage all the relevant data with AI assistance, replacing complex workflows with simple natural prompts.
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Generative Experiences
| Moment 1: Generative Virtual Twin Physics Behavior Creation | |
Challenge Solution Benefit
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| Moment 2: Generative Structural Performance Prediction | |
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| Challenge Solution Benefit
In real-world terms, this saved 12 months of development time, cut material usage from thousands of bottles a year to hundreds, and eliminated 1,500 tonnes of plastic waste from first engagements alone — turning physics-informed design from a rare, costly checkpoint into a routine, everyday part of the design process.
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| Moment 3: Virtual Twin Physics Behavior | |
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