How Dassault Systèmes Is Building AI That Understands Physics | NVIDIA AI Podcast Ep. 296

The agents can use the Virtual Twin as a gym to train themselves. So they can run, in fact, millions of simulations or design experimentations and present to you, to the human, to the engineer, there is a proven solution. Welcome to the NVIDIA AI Podcast. I'm Noah Kravitz. My guest is Nicolas Cerisier. Nicolas is vice president of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform R&D for Dassault Systèmes. We're here to talk about the next generation of agentic AI systems, including industry world models, Virtual Companions, and the systems that are driving them. Nicolas, welcome to the NVIDIA AI Podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Thank you, Noah, and thank you for the invitation and this opportunity to be part of this podcast. Absolutely, the pleasure is ours. So maybe we can start with you telling the audience a little bit about Dassault Systèmes—have a long-running partnership with NVIDIA, so you can speak to that a little, and then also to what your role is and what the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is. Okay, so I'm Nicolas Cerisier. I joined Dassault Systèmes in 2004, and I'm now the vice president of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform research and development. And you have to know that the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is really the foundation for our 12 brands at Dassault Systèmes. You know, I think the main brands CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, SIMULIA, etc. And if you don't know us, we enable our customers to imagine, design, simulate, build almost everything in the world. Cars, airplanes, autonomous robots, furniture, electronic devices, therapeutics, med devices, etc. It's four hundred thousand customers, 45 million users, 15 million scientists and engineers all around the world using our solution every day. And in fact, we provide our customers the factories to create their Virtual Twins. And what is Virtual Twins? It's really the scientific, multidisciplinary, multiscale, V plus R, virtual plus real representation of the product you want to deliver. And in fact, we enable a product to be tested in the virtual world, in the real condition before anything exists in the real world. And so today, my focus leading the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is really to transform our platform architecture into an agentic platform. And in fact, this is our shift from a SaaS platform, a SaaS architecture, to an agent-as-a-service platform to bring AI to all our customers. So much has happened in the world of AI in the past few years, and generative AI, obviously, has been this touchpoint that set off large language models and reasoning, and now we're talking about agentic systems. So let's talk about these two terms, Virtual Companions and industry world models. And what do those mean to Dassault and the Dassault world? How do you use them, and how are they different from the types of generative AI that people might be used to using for the past few years? Yeah, so let's start with industrial world model. Our ambition, in fact, is to build AI for industry. It's very, very, really important for us. Industry is at the core of everything we do. And for us, AI for industry relies on three core principles. It should be grounded in science. And this is what we do for more than 40 years now. We are a scientific company. We deliver modeling technologies, simulation technologies. Then it should be fueled by industry knowledge. And it should be sovereign by design—from the underlying infrastructure up to the models themselves. So how is it different from a generative AI? I think a classic generative AI learns the dynamics of the world from the observation and the perception of the world. So let's imagine they can see a video of a plane. They can predict if the plane will take off, if it will fly, but, in fact, they don't really know why. Because they don't have the scientific explanation and the scientific foundation to understand that. And obviously, a plane does not fly by accident. So, in fact, our industry world model principles, they understand how things work. They really understand the scientific foundation. They include the scientific, physical laws of the world. The physics, the engineering rules, chemistry, material science, etc. And they combine the multi-scale, multi-discipline modeling and simulation technologies we provide with AI. And the technology we are delivering, our industry world models, rely on three technical pillars. First, industrial knowledge. Here we are talking about the standards, the regulations, the processes from the different industries we serve. And we embed the real-world engineering rules, so the AI will understand and will speak the language of the industry, the jargon of the industry. Right, right. You see? Then the virtual, the world understanding, the world industrial understanding. Here, we are delivering an ecosystem of specialized industrial AI models, which operate on our Virtual Twins. So, the virtual and real representation of the product you deliver. Right, right. And this integrates the structure and the physics behavior. So, combined with our Dassault Systèmes modeling and simulation technologies and solvers, this is how we can ensure that the AI will be grounded in science. And last is the industrial reasoning and generation. And this is where the agentic choreography takes place, and activating the industrial knowledge and the world representation to perform the experience-based reasoning. And so, how about Virtual Companion now? If, in fact, if the industry world model provides the intelligence, the Virtual Companion turns that intelligence into action. What we mean with Virtual Companion... Virtual Companion are your coworkers. They understand your intent, of course, but they will reason with industry world models to orchestrate, execute action in context of your business, of your industry. So they will comply with the regulation, with your KPIs, etc. And they will protect your most precious IP, of course. And something important—we don't want to replace people. We want to augment people. We want free time for people to innovate and solve problems. So a few months ago, we introduced three Virtual Companions. AURA, the business expert. LEO, the engineer who solves complex engineering challenges. And MARIE, the scientist who brings deep scientific expertise. So when you're designing and deploying the Virtual Companions, and if we think about sort of a workforce, a virtual workforce of companions that, as you said, aren't replacing human workers, but working side-by-side with us, in an environment like in a manufacturing environment or industrial environment where... You know, I think of my work in content, creating content, podcasting and writing, and if an LLM hallucinates, then, you know, hopefully I catch it, and I can make the correction, or maybe it inspires me to something. If a system hallucinates in an industrial environment, the consequences could be much more dire. So how do you build trust into these systems so that the people who are designing and deploying and working in these environments feel confident working alongside the Virtual Companions? In fact, I think the foundation for trust in our system is the scientific foundation, scientific background, then the human in the loop, because at the end, human is accountable and remain in the loop, and the choreography will pause when humans have to take decision at the critical milestone of the execution. And something very important we deliver, and I think which is unique, is what we call IPLM, IP Lifecycle Management, where we enforce the lineage, auditability, traceability of all the interactions of AI. So we are able to know that your content has been modified through which workflow, using what kind of models, etc. And we provide the source of trust to understand how your Virtual Companion behaves with your content. So NVIDIA is bringing technologies, open models, Omniverse, accelerated computing, AI physics libraries, all these technologies into the stack. How do technologies like these help enable more capable and more secure agentic workflows? So NVIDIA technologies, in fact, infuse in every layer So NVIDIA technologies, in fact, infuse in every layer of our architecture—from NVIDIA AI with AI factories for GPUs and computing infrastructure to NVIDIA AI, CUDA X libraries, Omniverse technologies to accelerate AI training, inference, and simulation. Regarding NVIDIA AI and agentic, we focus on our partnership with NVIDIA on three axes. Understanding, reasoning, and execution. Understanding—we integrate NVIDIA NIMs models into our OUTSCALE Kubernetes platform. OUTSCALE is our IaaS. It's a brand from Dassault Systèmes. And we are a huge fan of NIMs because it's super easy to deploy and... perfect. Always glad to hear it. All our team are in love with NIMs. Awesome, love to hear it. So we leverage NVIDIA open models for multimodality— Riva, Parse VLM. And with Parse, we improve, for example, by 30%, our document injection and throughput. Plus also some industry-specific models, such as BioNeMo for our virtual companion, MARIE, the scientist. About reasoning now, we leverage Nemotron 3 Super and the reasoning performance for AURA, LEO, and MARIE have been improved by 20% without specific optimization. And this is thanks to the collaboration with NVIDIA. We shared our industrial use case and benchmark. And so we were able to iterate together and to optimize the model and the integration. And then about execution. With NVIDIA, we are continuously improving the agentic execution. Leveraging the recent announcement of AI-Q Blueprint and Deep Agent. And we are also interested in prototyping the recent announcement of NemoClaw, of course. And we are exploring Dynamo to optimize the GPU optimization and NeMo Agent Toolkit for the optimization of our agentic workflows. Can you speak a little bit to the partnership? You've mentioned it as you've been talking, but just kind of... You've mentioned it as you've been talking, but just kind of... how it got started and more kind of what it means to Dassault and what it enables you to do. In fact, for over 25 years now, as you said, Dassault Systèmes and NVIDIA have redefined what is possible together. Moving from accelerating pixels, to accelerating computing, and now to accelerating industrial AI. And so back in 20... back in 2000, from acceleration of visualization of CATIA V5, our flagship brand and app, leveraging NVIDIA GPUs, to accelerating computing for SIMULIA, Abaqus, and XFlow, our simulation brand, with CUDA and of course, GPUs. To accelerating and optimization rendering with Iray, RTX, and now with DLSS. And so this year, we are opening a new chapter in this story with AI and combining NVIDIA technologies within our 3DEXPERIENCE platform to deliver industrial AI platform to our customers. I wanna ask you about open and proprietary models and running a hybrid model. And my understanding is that Dassault runs hybrid models quite a bit. Can you speak a little bit to kind of the pros and cons of each and why you go with a hybrid model so often? Yeah, you're right. We have a hybrid approach. Of course, we build our own models. But we want to rely on the best-in-class frontier models provided by NVIDIA, such as Nemotron. Of course. Our optimized model by NVIDIA and available through NIMs, which, as I said before, enables seamless deployment. It's super easy. Or we have also a partnership with other model providers, such as Mistral. In fact, we select our models and our partners based on the performance of the model, of course, but also about the sovereignty and the regulation constraints. Because we operate worldwide, We have a customer in all industries and many customers in regulated or very sensitive industries. So we have to comply with all regulations and all the auditability problems. Right, right. And so from that, we also want to calibrate the model with the customer knowledge. So we inject the industry knowledge through fine-tuning or RAG, depending on the use case. But more generally, we believe in open standards. And so we embrace and we support open standards, such as MCP or agent-to-agent. In fact, it empowers our agentic platform to leverage third-party industrial system and enable, in fact, interoperable or cross-system agentic choreographies. I wanna ask if we can dig in a little bit to a specific use case to kind of get a flavor for some of the things your customers are doing. But maybe if there's an example that comes to mind you could speak to that really illustrates the use of the Virtual Companions and the Dassault platform. I think one super cool example, I think, is LEO mechanical designer. We showcased this live, this new Virtual Companion, in our 3DEXPERIENCE World conference last February with Jensen attending this conference. And so here, you give Leo a 3D scan or a 2D drawing or a mesh of a part. It will activate the industry world model for design, orchestrate the AI model and the modeling and simulation solvers, and it will perform multi-tier planning, enabling the... evaluating, in fact, the mechanical interface of the part, find the physics, the kinematics, and the design rules. And at the end, it will generate the optimized design. It's physically aware, manufacture ready, and it will do it right the first time. It's a very super example. I think it really illustrates our transformation from a SaaS to an agent-as-a-service platform. And in fact, it... In fact, with that, we are giving to our millions of designers the power to innovate faster. But it's not just about speed, it's about reliability and trust. And because you know that your design works because it is born from science, from physics, and is augmented with your industry knowledge. That change that you referenced from a SaaS company to an agent-as-a-service company. Kind of from a philosophical standpoint, I guess, or an emotional standpoint, does it feel natural? Is it a big shift? Is it just kind of part of the way of doing things to keep innovating and delivering for your customers, and so it's just kind of the natural progression of things? How do you think about it? It's really about, in fact, with the rise of AI, we think ourselves... What is the deep impact of AI in what we do, in what we deliver? What will be the new experience for the user? What will be the new technology? We all see the Claude Code, etc. What if you apply such transformation to our industrial software, in fact? So it came from that, in fact, really. And so this is a lot of discussion and brainstorming at Dassault Systèmes. And in fact, we don't want to add AI on top of what we do. We want to put AI at the core. And this is why we are working with NVIDIA on the different topics. what's a typical way to get started? What's the first project that a customer might typically undertake to get started with Virtual Companions and working with them? I think... You should start from your core business and your core challenge, in fact. Right, of course. This is where you will have attention from your teams. This is where you have your knowledge, your deep knowledge and your deep know-how. And this is how you know to measure the real impact of your AI and agentic transformation. And we have an example of connecting to LEO mechanical design. We are working with NIAR. And NIAR is one of our customers working with us on Virtual Companion. And what they are going to do is they recreate the Virtual Twin of existing aircraft. It means that they are creating thousands of parts without access to the original design. So basically, they disassemble the aircraft and recreate virtually piece by piece. So, of course, with LEO, you can imagine how it changed their life, automatically generating the 3D part from their multiple sources. That's incredible. So like everything else in technology, in AI now, Virtual Twins, Virtual Companions, simulation, just accelerating, advancing so quickly, and obviously agentic frameworks and models are developing just as quickly, if not faster. What's next? What's on the horizon for Dassault Systèmes? What are the kinds of things you're thinking about? And then if you're game to take it a step further, where do you think agentic systems and the idea of virtual coworkers is headed? First, I think Dassault Systèmes' strategy is fully aligned with the recent NVIDIA announcement about NemoClaw, AI-Q, all the the agentic stuff. And the rise, in fact, of the long-running autonomous agents. And we fully agree on the associated industrial challenges— security, compliance, etc. And tomorrow, our Virtual Companion—AURA, LEO, and MARIE—we believe they will stay awake and they will continuously monitor your factory, your project execution, your supply chain in real time, and they will proactively optimize it, optimize the Virtual Twin without being prompted by a human. So it will create, in fact, I think, a closed-loop autonomy. And because of our industry world models are grounded in physics, I think the agents can use a Virtual Twin as a gym to train themselves. So they can run, in fact, millions of simulations or design experimentation and present to you, to the human, to the engineer, the proven solution. And you just have at the end to validate. And from that, the Virtual Twin, in fact, becomes a self-evolving asset. That gets smarter day after day, in fact. Nicolas, there's so much going on. For listeners who want to learn more, want to learn more about the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, about Dassault's work with everything we've talked about, Virtual Companions and industry world models, where's a good place to go? The Dassault website? Social media? Are there research papers? Where can listeners go to learn more? Mainly on the Dassault Systèmes website, 3ds.com, or on our LinkedIn page, where we are communicating more and more on AI. Thanks also to the NVIDIA collaboration, we are posting more and more about what we are doing. So, yeah, perfect. Yeah, that's free and connect with us. Excellent. Well, Nicolas, again, congratulations on all the work and thank you for the years of collaboration with NVIDIA. Thank you. And best of luck in everything you're doing. Thank you to NVIDIA, to the team, the incredible team.