As artificial intelligence (AI) pervades the world of connected production and engineering, the maturity of AI and the ability to create powerful AI models has propelled the industrial sector into a new era based on experience agents and driving a generative economy, said Gian Paolo Bassi, senior vice-president of leading engineering software provider Dassault Systèmes.
Speaking at the 3DExperience World event, dedicated to the community of users of the company’s SolidWorks and 3DExperience platforms, Bassi stated that the conversation of the sector has evolved from Industry 4.0, which he said was focused on automation, productivity and innovation without taking into account the effect of technological changes in society.
“The industry has decided that it’s time for an evolution,” he said. “It’s called Industry 5.0. What we say is that at the intersection of the experience economy there is a new, compelling necessity to be sustainable, to create a circular economy. So then, at the intersection, [we have] the generative economy.”
Dassault first revealed it was working with generative AI design principles in 2024, and as the practice has evolved, Bassi said it now captures two fundamental concepts. The first is the ability of AI to create new and original content based on large language models, translated into industries and comprising details of processes, business models, designs of parts assemblies, specifications and manufacturing practices. These models, he stressed, would not be traditional, generic, compute-intensive models such as Chat GPT: they would instead be very vertical, industry-specific, and trained on engineering content and technical documentation.
“We can now build large models of everything, which is a virtual twin, and we can get to a level of sophistication where new ideas can come in, be tested, and much more knowledge can be put into the innovation process,” said Bassi. “This is a tipping point. [Second], it is generative in the terms of getting inspiration from nature. Nature is generative: it generates and regenerates itself. These are the two elements that we like to put into the generative economy.
“These two elements have entered as full part of the 3DExperince platform,” he added. “It’s not a technological change. It’s a technological expansion – a very important one – because we are going to improve to increase our portfolio with AI agents, with virtual companions and also content, because generative AI can generate content and can generate, more importantly, know-how and knowledge that can be put to use by our customers immediately.
“We want to provide large models of design practices, manufacturing practices, simulation and everything that is happening in engineering,” said Bassi. “We can create agents to make engineering processes faster, smoother, more reliable and also more sustainable. You train AI on cost, the concept of reuse, recyclability, durability, planning for product end of life. That can bring in substantial improvement in the sustainability of our industry operations, and also in savings in the design of products and in the life cycle of products so they become more economical.”
The upshot of the tipping point for the software provider would be that it’s now shifting from just providing tools to design a range of products to also providing companions that can generate engineering content and bring knowledge and know-how to a next level – because, in Bassi’s belief, this is fundamentally what AI is best at: exploiting the large models of industrial practices. And with the most important benefit of addressing customer needs as the capabilities of AI are translated into the industrial world, offering a pathway for engineers to save precious time in research and spend more activity on being creative in design.
Bassi was adamant that, conscious of the actual phenomenon or not, the concept of Industry 5.0 was being adopted by every one of the company’s customers, putting in place policies to support the concept and looking to generate sustainability gains when deploying software in their industry, improving the safety and ergonomics of workplaces, as well as workflows.
Yet in aiming to generate gains in sustainability through Industry 5.0, the increased use of AI can potentially see massively increased power usage, and also the need to invest in much more robust and responsive connected network infrastructures to support the massive increase in AI-based workloads and the cloud offerings it can boost.
For Bassi, it will be a case of short-term pain to create long-term gain. “We discovered that creating these models is very costly at the beginning, so the investment and the cost in energy to create the models is huge,” he said. “And right now, there is this rush to create larger and more compressive models.
“However, it may [just] be a temporary limitation of the technology,” said Bassi. “In fact, as DeepSeek has demonstrated, it is indeed possible that you don’t need the huge models to do specific tasks. You have to solve the energy problem, not only for AI, but for humankind. And AI is probably going to help that [and] become a self-solving type of thing. These large models will make it possible to solve a bigger problem.
“As regards [improving] the cost of the infrastructure to bring collaboration to the next level, this is already happening today,” he added. “[The roll-out of] 5G and other technologies like low-orbit satellites are becoming cheap and ever-present. I think these technologies are going to improve the infrastructure, and make it more powerful and accessible. It’s already happening. I think the bandwidth that is necessary [to support virtual twins and a fully immersive environment] is probably already there.”
