I’m heading to 3DEXPERIENCE World 2026 with a very specific intention: to observe, not to collect announcements.
This does not feel like a year of dramatic breakthroughs. It feels like a year of tightening. A year where Dassault Systèmes is trying to make its story smaller, clearer, and more believable, especially for the SOLIDWORKS ecosystem.
Why 3DEXPERIENCE World 2026 Feels Like a Transition Moment
For more than a decade, Dassault has had all the necessary ingredients: CAD, PLM, simulation, manufacturing, data management, and now AI. The issue has never been capability. The issue has been coherence. From the outside, and often from the user’s perspective, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform felt less like a guided journey and more like a catalog of possibilities.
If you’ve been around long enough, you know the running joke: you don’t need documentation, you need a map of “37 things confused about 3DEXPERIENCE.” by Peter Brinkhuis Not because the ideas were wrong, but because the path from daily engineering work to platform level value was rarely obvious.
Houston feels different not because that confusion has magically disappeared, but because Dassault seems to be narrowing the narrative around two pillars:
- PLM as the governed product backbone
- AI as the layer that finally makes that backbone operational and usable
That pairing is not new. What’s new is the insistence that they belong together, and that they must finally make sense for SOLIDWORKS users, not just enterprise architects.
SOLIDWORKS: A Massive Ecosystem with a Desktop DNA
You cannot understand 3DEXPERIENCE World without understanding SOLIDWORKS, not as a product, but as a culture.
Founded by Jon Hirschtick and his team back in 1993, SolidWorks grew because it optimized relentlessly for individual engineers and small teams. Desktop CAD on Windows. Files you can see, copy, and control. Workflows that reward speed, autonomy, and problem solving over formal process. That DNA is not a weakness. It’s the reason the ecosystem became enormous.
But that DNA matters deeply when the conversation shifts to PLM platforms and AI.
Most SOLIDWORKS customers still operate in a hybrid reality:
- File systems and shared drives
- PDM vaults used primarily for version control
- BOMs in Excel because they are flexible, fast, and understandable
This is not negligence. It’s pragmatism. For many teams, formal PLM has historically meant friction: more rules, more screens, more overhead. 3D EXPERIENCE is a multiplier. So they delayed it, minimized it, or avoided it altogether.
This is where many AI narratives also quietly skip a step. AI leverages structure. It assumes connected data. It assumes that product definitions, BOMs, changes, and requirements exist in a coherent model. But AI does not create that coherence, it exploits it. If the data foundation is weak, AI doesn’t fix the problem. It surfaces it faster and more visibly.
So when I listen to AI promises in Houston, I’m not asking whether the copilots are clever. I’m asking whether Dassault is finally addressing the structural gap between SOLIDWORKS’ desktop first reality and the platform centric assumptions of modern PLM.
PLM, Reintroduced – Again?
Every time Dassault talks about simplifying PLM, I feel a strong sense of déjà vu. It takes me back 25 years ago to my SmarTeam past.
Dassault talks about simplifying PLM for engineering teams and brings PLM Express. Back 20 years ago, I remember PLM Express with SmarTeam. Here it is coming again – welcome 3D EXPERIENCE PLM Express .
In the early 2000s, CATIA SmarTeam PLM Express tried to package design and product lifecycle management for smaller companies. The idea was right, but the timing was wrong – Windows installs, complexity, sales channels, fragile infrastructure, and a cultural leap from files to lifecycle data thinking that most teams simply weren’t ready to make.
A decade later, ENOVIA pushed to position as a PLM backbone for large enterprises, solving scale, governance, and compliance, while quietly confirming to many SOLIDWORKS users that “real PLM” was something meant for someone else. SOLIDWORKS eco-system largely ignores it.
Now, with 3DEXPERIENCE, Dassault is back with PLM Express once again, this time cloud-native, role-based, and (maybe) enhanced with AI. The technology excuses are mostly gone. What hasn’t changed is the harder question I’ll be listening for in Houston: has Dassault finally figured out how to help engineers transition from file-centric freedom into lifecycle discipline without turning PLM into friction?
For me, that’s the real test of 3DEXPERIENCE World 2026. Not whether the platform is more capable, it clearly is, but whether Dassault finally treats PLM adoption as a long transition engineers have to live through, not a bundle they can simply subscribe to.
The question that remains is the same one Dassault has been circling for twenty years:
How do you help engineers transition from file centric freedom into lifecycle discipline without turning PLM into friction?
This is not a technology problem. It’s a transition problem.
PLM as the Governed Backbone (Again, but More Explicitly)
One thing Dassault is doing more clearly this time is stating the role of PLM outright.
PLM is no longer framed as a system you “add” to CAD. It is framed as the environment where the product actually exists over time. Product definition. BOMs. Changes. Compliance. Sustainability. Traceability. All of it lives in one governed backbone.
This is a familiar story for enterprise PLM users, but it is still new, and often uncomfortable, for SOLIDWORKS teams. Many engineers have learned to treat PLM as a necessary evil: a place to archive files after the real work is done.
At 3D EXPERIENCE 2026 in Houston I expect Dassault to attempt to flip that narrative. PLM is not the archive. PLM is the context in which decisions happen.
That’s an important shift, but also a risky one. It requires engineers to trust that the platform will help them move faster, not slow them down. And that trust cannot be built with architecture diagrams or bundle names. It has to be earned in real daily workflows.
AI Enters the Picture and Raises the Stakes
AI is not a side story at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2026. It is the story.
Assistive AI. Predictive AI. Generative AI. Virtual companions. Copilots. The language varies, but the message is consistent: AI is meant to reduce effort, automate repetitive tasks, and surface insights that engineers and planners cannot easily see on their own.
I believe that direction is inevitable. But AI also raises the stakes for PLM.
AI systems need context. They need relationships. They need trustworthy data. They need to understand not just geometry, but intent: why a design changed, which alternatives were considered, what constraints applied, and how decisions ripple across manufacturing and supply chains.
In other words, AI needs PLM to actually work.
This is why I’m less interested in AI that generates shapes faster and more interested in AI that touches BOMs, changes, requirements, and cross functional workflows. That’s where value compounds, and where weak data models are immediately exposed.
If AI is the accelerant, PLM is still the fuel. And bad fuel doesn’t burn cleanly.
Desktop Culture Meets Platform Reality
There is a cultural collision at the heart of the 3DEXPERIENCE story.
On one side is SOLIDWORKS’ desktop heritage: individual productivity, local control, and file based workflows. On the other side is the platform worldview: shared models, continuous connectivity, and lifecycle governance.
Neither side is wrong. But they operate on very different assumptions.
This is why PLM adoption has always been slow and uneven. Not because engineers resist structure, but because structure has historically been imposed in ways that ignored how engineering work actually happens.
What I’m watching for in Houston is whether Dassault finally treats adoption as a gradual transition rather than a switch. Not “move to the platform,” but “grow into it.” Not “replace your workflow,” but “extend it.”
That distinction matters more than any feature.
What I’m actually watching for in Houston
I’m not going to Houston to count announcements or memorize bundle names. I’m going to listen for answers to quieter questions.
I want to hear real stories of SOLIDWORKS teams moving incrementally, from files and PDM into platform based lifecycle thinking. I want to see whether PLM Express reduces daily friction or simply repackages it. I want to understand how AI is being used inside change management, BOM evolution, and cross functional decision making, not just in isolated demos.
I’m also listening for honesty. Acknowledgment that adoption takes time. That not every team is ready for the full platform on day one. That PLM is not a purchase, it’s a journey.
What is my conclusion?
Here is the thing… PLM keeps coming back because the problem never went away. PLM keeps being reintroduced because the underlying problem never disappeared.
Engineering teams grow. Products become more complex. Regulations increase. Supply chains fragment. Data gravity wins. Files stop scaling.
Every generation of tools tries to solve this in its own way. SmarTeam tried. ENOVIA scaled it. 3DEXPERIENCE is trying again, this time with cloud and AI on its side.
3DEXPERIENCE World 2026 will not resolve this tension in four days. But it may show whether Dassault has finally learned that PLM success is less about packaging and more about empathy: meeting engineers where they are and helping them move forward without breaking how they work.
That, not any single announcement, is what I’ll be listening for in Houston.
Are you in Houston and want to talk?
Contact me directly (DM) and I’d be happy to talk about SolidWorks, BOMs, AI, Change Management and many other topics.
Best, Oleg
Disclaimer: I’m the co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM, a collaborative digital thread platform that helps engineering and manufacturing teams work with connected, structured product data, increasingly augmented by AI-powered automation and insights.
