Can SolidWorks' AI Features Replace Design Review Software?

SolidWorks has released a number of AI capabilities over the last two years. SolidWorks 2025 introduced new AI functionality and SolidWorks 2026 continues to build on it with enhancements to existing tools and the introduction of more. The focus across both releases has been reducing the time designers spend on repetitive CAD tasks.

So the question engineers are starting to ask is a fair one: Do these AI features cover what used to require a dedicated design review platform, or do both still have a role?

Some of SolidWorks’ new AI capabilities include:

• AURA and LEO: Provides AI-assisted responses to design questions and task guidance within the SolidWorks environment.
• Command Predictor: Surfaces relevant tools and commands based on your current session context.
• What’s Wrong analysis: Provides suggested causes and fixes for model errors based on AI analysis of the error state.
• AI-assisted drawing generation: Helps automate drawing setup — such as view creation, dimensioning, and formatting — providing a structured starting point rather than a fully finished drawing.

These capabilities vary in maturity, but they point in the same direction: automating repetitive, low-value work so designers can focus on higher-impact decisions. But every one of them operates inside SolidWorks, for the designer sitting in SolidWorks. That is the right problem to solve, but it is also an entirely different challenge from design review.

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SolidWorks' AI Features Are Built for CAD Authoring, Not Collaborative Review

‍Improving a product design and aligning disparate stakeholders around that design are not the same problem. Even with the best AI features for CAD design, a traditional design review workflow will still run into three critical gaps.

1. The “access gap” means your most important reviewers can’t participate easily.

SolidWorks is a CAD authoring tool. That’s where its value is concentrated, and that’s what its interface reflects. For the manufacturing engineer doing a DFM check, the quality engineer reviewing tolerances, or the supplier flagging a feasibility concern, the authoring capability is beside the point — and the learning curve that comes with it is friction they shouldn’t have to absorb. More importantly, SolidWorks has no structured mechanism for capturing feedback, assigning issue ownership, or tracking resolution. Even if every stakeholder had a seat, the tool isn’t built for what a design review actually requires.

2. The “feedback gap” means context gets lost before it can be acted on.

AURA is a capable assistant for a designer working through a modeling problem in a single session, but it is not designed to capture cross-functional feedback, assign issue ownership, track resolution status, or produce an audit trail across a full review cycle. Without a structured system for that, feedback ends up where it always has: scattered across email threads, buried in slide decks, and disconnected from the revision it was meant to address. The design moves forward, but the context doesn’t.

3. The “knowledge gap” means every program starts from scratch.

Every design review generates engineering decisions and issue resolutions. To date, SolidWorks has no mechanism to capture that feedback, index it, or surface it when a similar design challenge comes up in a future program. Without a dedicated system to do that, knowledge stays locked in the heads of whoever was in the room — or buried in places nobody can find. The next program starts from scratch, where the same issues resurface. The cost of catching them keeps shifting later into the development cycle, where engineering changes are most expensive to make.

Closing the Gaps with CoLab

A dedicated design review platform is not competing with SolidWorks. Rather, it is solving a challenge that SolidWorks, by design, doesn’t address.

Let’s start with the human side. CoLab opens design reviews to every stakeholder who needs to participate through a secure browser link, with no software install and no SolidWorks license required. Reviewers can explore the 3D model or 2D drawing natively in their browser, pin feedback directly to geometry with saved view states, and add GD&T symbols, markups, and annotations in context.

Because CoLab is built for teams, not individuals, every reviewer is working in the same space. Comments are visible as they’re made and responses stay anchored to the geometry they refer to. Every piece of feedback is automatically organized into a structured issue tracking database with an assigned owner, status, priority, and resolution path. That solves the access gap and the feedback gap at once.

Then there’s AutoReview. Once your cross-functional reviewers are in the loop, CoLab's AI peer checker analyzes 3D models and 2D drawings and adds markups and annotations directly on the design before a human reviewer ever opens the file. Unlike a general-purpose CAD assistant, AutoReview is trained on your organization’s own standards, engineering guidelines, checklists, and past review feedback. The issues it surfaces are specific to how your team designs and manufactures, not a generic checklist. By the time your review meeting starts, the documented design rules are already checked off, and your reviewers can focus on the complex tradeoffs that actually require their judgment.

Over time, that feedback becomes the foundation for CoLab’s AI Lessons Learned. CoLab identifies similarities between new designs and past programs, then automatically surfaces the relevant feedback and decisions from those historical reviews at the start of each new review. Your engineers can apply past knowledge when and where it matters most: before problems get locked into the design. That’s the knowledge gap closed.
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How CoLab and SolidWorks Cover the Full Loop

CoLab isn’t an alternative to SolidWorks. In fact, it offers a native SolidWorks integration so that sending files from SolidWorks into CoLab for review and decision-making is straightforward from within the session designers already use. There’s no Pack and Go, no manual export to STEP, and no version tracking in a shared folder. Native SolidWorks file formats, including SLDASM and SLDPRT, open in CoLab’s browser-based viewer without data degradation, and neutral formats like STEP and IGES are supported too. 

With the SolidWorks PDM integration, CoLab pulls in associated metadata automatically so that reviewers can see full design context alongside the geometry. When a reviewer closes an issue and a designer acts on it, they can pull the file back into SolidWorks, make the change, and upload the new iteration from their session. The complete revision history and digital thread stay intact in CoLab throughout.

SolidWorks’ AI capabilities make your designers faster at building and troubleshooting models. CoLab makes your entire organization, across every function and every stakeholder, more effective at reviewing, improving, and learning from designs. Because they operate in different layers of the product development process, you don’t have to choose between them. Together, they cover the full product development loop: from faster individual design work, to structured cross-functional reviews, to institutional knowledge that carries forward into every future program.

If your design reviews still run on email threads, PowerPoint decks, and spreadsheets, more AI features inside SolidWorks will not necessarily change that. Those are collaboration and knowledge capture problems, and they need tools built specifically to solve them. SolidWorks teams like Kraken Robotics and IMI Critical Engineering are already using CoLab to run reviews that are faster, more inclusive, and less likely to let critical feedback slip through — all without changing the CAD workflow their designers already rely on.

See how CoLab’s SolidWorks integration could work for your team.

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