Where AI is actually changing engineering work — not the marketing. Agentic systems in PLM, LLMs for BOM and change-order navigation, ML in generative design, and the realistic gap between vendor claims and shipped capability.
3 articles
Siemens PLM Components 2026 at Downing College Cambridge brought together kernel teams, customers, and AI-first startups around one question: as geometry representations multiply and AI agents enter the loop, what role does Parasolid play in the next decade of engineering software?
600 startups across 45 countries. 10 unicorns. $15.7 billion in venture capital. Back-to-back Threaded conferences in Warwick and Miami showed a parallel engineering software industry that is shipping what incumbents have failed to deliver — and rewriting how engineering work is done.
CDFAM Barcelona 2026 brought founders, engineers, and researchers together around AI multi-agent systems and the inflection point where manual engineering workflows give way to autonomous, agent-native systems. Notes from the talks that mattered.