SimScale, an AI-native cloud platform for engineering simulation, has launched its SimScale Engineering AI Agent inside PTC’s Onshape cloud-native CAD and PDM platform.
Announced at IMTS 2026, the Engineering AI Agent brings CFD, thermal, Emag and FEA simulation toolsets directly to designers when they need it, without the engineer needing to leave the Onshape environment or hand the job off to a specialist.
From a single prompt, the agent can reportedly reason through the full simulation workflow, from proposing a setup and preparing CAD geometry to running the physics and interpreting results in plain engineering language.
The agent is delivered as an integrated app through the Onshape App Store. It was built by SimScale to close the simulation gap often experienced by engineers. Instead of asking an engineer to become a simulation expert, or to hand a model off to one, the agent takes on the setup itself, proposing what physics applies, meshing the geometry, and choosing boundary conditions before it runs anything.
Within Onshape, the software acts as a reasoning agent on top of SimScale’s full physics platform. The engineer can step in at any point to adjust a setup, override a boundary condition, or review assumptions before handing control back to the agent.
“Every design decision is a moment where an engineer is guessing at how something will perform,” said Jon Wilde, VP product, SimScale. “We built the Engineering AI Agent so that guess doesn’t have to happen. It’s not that we made a lighter version of SimScale fit inside Onshape, it’s that we put a reasoning agent in front of the same physics platform our validation customers already trust, so it can make the calls a specialist used to make: how to set the model up, what to mesh, what to run. That’s what makes it usable by every design engineer on day one, not just the ones who already know simulation.”
SimScale frames this launch as the first deployment of a broader shift in how it wants its AI to work: agents that reason and act at the point where an engineering decision is actually being made, rather than passing a task between disconnected tools and waiting on the handoff.
The agent runs on the SimScale Agent API, which keeps every run auditable, keeps data under the customer’s existing governance, and provisions compute automatically. The agent’s reasoning layer sits on top of a platform already used by more than 900,000 engineers for CFD, FEA, thermal, and electromagnetic simulation.
“The promise of AI in engineering isn’t just automation, it’s delivering meaningful insight when engineers need it most,” added Greg Brown, VP of product at Onshape by PTC. “SimScale’s Engineering AI Agent helps teams move from design to validation more seamlessly, giving engineers faster access to simulation-driven feedback within the environment where they already work.”
