What AI Tools Are Available in SOLIDWORKS in 2026?

If you’re looking for AI tools that pair well with SOLIDWORKS, one of the first places to look is within SOLIDWORKS itself.

Throughout 2026, Dassault Systèmes has added AI across CAD authoring, drawing creation, model troubleshooting, assembly setup, and engineering guidance. That makes it useful to separate two questions: What can AI already do inside SOLIDWORKS and When does it make sense to bring in another tool?

As with most questions of this sort, it ultimately comes down to the engineering problem you and your team are trying to solve.

What AI tools are already available in SOLIDWORKS?

SOLIDWORKS AI now includes a combination of embedded features and AI Virtual Companions. Current capabilities include Command Predictor, Generative Drawings, What’s Wrong Analysis, AI-Powered Assembly Structure Generator, and Auto-Fastener Recognition.

SOLIDWORKS is also introducing more of these capabilities through its AI Virtual Companions.

AURA is primarily focused on engineering context and knowledge. Engineers can ask questions about an active design or project, find relevant documentation, and navigate information across SOLIDWORKS and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

LEO is more directly involved in mechanical design. Its capabilities now extend into drawing generation, model troubleshooting, assembly analysis, simulation, and converting imported STEP and IGES geometry into parametric models. Dassault Systèmes has continued adding new LEO capabilities throughout its 2026 releases.

What is SOLIDWORKS AI best suited for?

Most of these capabilities have something important in common. Namely, they help an engineer create, understand, modify, or document a design in the CAD environment.

Command Predictor reduces the time spent finding the next modeling command, while Generative Drawings reduces drawing setup. What’s Wrong Analysis helps diagnose a model that isn’t behaving as expected. And in addition to those, LEO can take on more involved CAD and engineering tasks while maintaining access to the design context.

In other words, SOLIDWORKS is increasingly applying AI to the activities that happen while an engineer is designing in SOLIDWORKS.

But not every engineering problem surrounding a SOLIDWORKS model is a CAD-authoring problem. So what should we look for if AI in SOLIDWORKS doesn't fit the specific task we need to work on?

Where does SOLIDWORKS AI still fall short?

SOLIDWORKS AI is getting broader quickly, so some of the gaps that existed even a year ago are already narrowing. In the September 2026 FD04 release, for example, LEO gained the ability to review models, assemblies, and drawings against company-specific or industry-standard release checklists, alongside new capabilities for drawing generation, design parameterization, sheet-metal layouts, and sketch analysis.

That makes it harder to draw a simple line between “AI inside CAD” and “AI outside CAD.” But there are still important limits.

For one, a defined engineering check is not the same thing as a complete design review. LEO can evaluate a design against known release criteria, but many important issues aren't expressed in a checklist. A manufacturing engineer may know that a specific tolerance will be difficult to hold consistently. Meanwhile, asupplier may recognize a familiar tooling problem. And elsewhere, an experienced engineer may remember that a similar feature caused problems on an earlier program. Reviewing a design often means bringing all of that knowledge together, discussing the feedback, deciding what needs to change, and following the issue through subsequent revisions.

But the trouble tends to lie in the act of bringing all that expertise together, which is a different problem from, say, cross-referencing a checklist and determining the review is complete.

There is a similar limitation around engineering knowledge. AURA can retrieve and summarize SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3DSwym information, but that doesn't automatically give it access to the design decisions and lessons a company has accumulated across previous reviews. And while LEO can assist with simulation and other forms of engineering analysis, the presence of an AI capability doesn't make the underlying engineering tools mature or interchangeable. Specialized simulation, physics AI, computational design, and optimization platforms can still go substantially deeper within their respective disciplines.

So the limitation isn't simply that SOLIDWORKS doesn't have AI for a particular engineering task. Increasingly, it does. Perhaps the better way to describe it is to determine whether its native capability has the depth, engineering knowledge, and surrounding workflow required for the problem you're trying to solve.

When do additional AI tools still make sense?

SOLIDWORKS AI is increasingly capable of creating, modifying, troubleshooting, and documenting designs inside CAD. Additional tools become more useful when the engineering question requires deeper analysis, company-specific knowledge, or input from people and systems outside the CAD session.

These tools don’t necessarily compete with SOLIDWORKS AI. Rather, they extend the workflow around the same design. An engineer might use SOLIDWORKS and LEO to create and troubleshoot a model, CoLab to review it against engineering requirements and capture manufacturing feedback, SimScale to evaluate physical performance, or nTop to optimize geometry.

The right choice depends on the engineering problem, not just whether a product happens to carry an AI label.

For specific examples, see our guide to the 4 Best AI Tools for SOLIDWORKS Users in 2026, where we compare CoLab, SimScale, Neural Concept, and nTop.

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