FEATURE
Why agentic AI matters
Traditional AI responds to questions and completes individual tasks.
Agentic AI understands objectives, plans activities, coordinates multiple workflows and adapts as conditions change while requiring limited supervision.
For manufacturers, this means intelligent systems capable of accelerating engineering, reducing repetitive work, improving collaboration, supporting faster product innovation and enabling experts to focus on creativity, strategic thinking and solving complex technical challenges.
Embedding AI directly into engineering workflows offers a practical response to these pressures. Instead of functioning as an isolated productivity assistant, intelligent companions become active participants throughout product development, coordinating knowledge, identifying optimisation opportunities and helping specialists navigate increasingly sophisticated design environments. This collaborative approach has the potential to improve productivity while preserving the creativity, judgement and experience that remain uniquely human. Organisations can also improve knowledge retention by ensuring valuable expertise becomes embedded within intelligent systems supporting future generations of engineers.
The broader significance extends well beyond manufacturing alone. Aerospace, automotive, life sciences, infrastructure, energy and advanced research organisations all depend on accurate engineering knowledge, complex simulations and multidisciplinary collaboration. Intelligent digital companions capable of understanding these specialised environments could fundamentally change how industrial expertise is shared, preserved and expanded across global organisations. They also have the potential to shorten development cycles, improve product quality and enable more sustainable innovation across industries increasingly dependent on digital engineering.
As agentic AI continues to mature, the distinction between human expertise and digital assistance is expected to become progressively more seamless. Rather than competing with engineers or scientists, systems such as AURA, LEO and MARIE are intended to become trusted collaborators that strengthen decision-making, accelerate innovation and unlock new possibilities across every stage of industrial development. Dassault Systèmes’ latest platform expansion suggests the future of engineering will be defined not by humans or artificial intelligence working independently, but by intelligent collaboration that combines the strengths of both. Through Virtual Twin Factories and AInative engineering, the company is presenting a vision where people and intelligent software collaborate seamlessly to solve industrial challenges that neither could address alone, establishing a new benchmark for Digital Transformation across global industry. • www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO EUROPE
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