PTC announced the latest AI advancements for its cloud-native Onshape® computer-aided design (CAD) and product data management (PDM) platform: Onshape AI Advisor is now embedded directly in the design environment, providing real-time guidance as users create. The update gives every user immediate access to the latest AI capabilities, deployed securely at scale.
"Onshape AI Advisor has become a valuable part of our design process," said Jacob Friedrich, Senior Mechanical Engineer at Current Lighting. "It helps me find features that are handled differently in other CAD tools, and the conversational interface makes refining queries simple. Since it’s built on official Onshape material, it delivers relevant, trustworthy answers that let us design rapidly and robustly."
Powered by Amazon Bedrock, the latest release of Onshape AI Advisor is the next step in bringing PTC’s broader vision for AI in product development to life:
- What’s Available Today: Onshape AI Advisor features a redesigned interface that is easily accessible within the main workspace, providing users with step-by-step recommendations, troubleshooting features, and best practices, all within their design environment.
- What’s Next on the Roadmap: PTC is advancing agent workflows to enable increased productivity for engineers using Onshape while maintaining enterprise-grade security and data protection. Teams will be able to collaborate with intelligent design agents embedded directly in their workflows to support interaction with model metadata, assist with model troubleshooting and tasks, generate FeatureScript code, and streamline repetitive operations. In addition, AI-assisted rendering will present significant potential to accelerate visualization and design review workflows.
- Future Vision: With its unique cloud-native architecture and extensive public model library, Onshape offers a foundation for advanced AI capabilities that set it apart from file-based CAD tools. PTC is exploring AI capabilities that include automated geometry creation, intelligent design optimization, and toolkits for customers with their own AI initiatives.
“Embedding AI Advisor directly into Onshape marks a new era of design intelligence,” said David Katzman, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Onshape and Arena, PTC. “We’re not just shipping AI features. We’re shaping an engineering culture where AI is a trusted partner in the design process. As the industry’s only cloud-native CAD and PDM platform, Onshape is positioned to lead the industry with integrating AI into product development.”
Onshape not only delivers new capabilities and platform enhancements to every user through its three-week release cycle, but it also gives customers the tools to drive their own AI projects. Its powerful, open API, scalable cloud compute resources, extensive public data library, and customizable configuration tools make it easy to train AI models and create synthetic data. These strengths have led to collaborations with leading AI startups and research organizations, while helping high-growth companies experiment with and adopt AI faster than traditional file-based systems allow.
