In Stay Sharp Episode 129, ENOVIA 2026 User Conference Wrap Up, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant sit down with two Razorleaf colleagues, Andrew Halley, Senior Director of Partnerships and Strategy, and François Schlub, Sales Executive, North America. Together they recap their time at Dassault Systèmes’ recent 3DEXPERIENCE & ENOVIA User Conference.
The Team’s Takeaways
And Then There’s AI
The most prominent topic for Andrew was migration to 3DEXPERIENCE—more about when people will migrate than if, and whether they’ll go to cloud or on-prem installation. But companies also have concerns and some fear about migration as well as another big topic: integration. Jonathan notes that the integrations being discussed are still just about point to point (A to B or B to C), not a web or mesh type of integration map, even though what customers really want is to create the digital thread.
Andrew Halley,
Senior Director of Partnerships and Strategy, RazorleafSomething that became clear to everyone was that Dassault Systèmes’ believes cloud is the answer. Where Jonathan sees the gap remaining wide is between people who’ve been in the PLM or digital thread journey for a while and are eager to hear about 3DEXPERIENCE innovations and those who are new and just needing to get control of their CAD files. “I think Dassault Systèmes’ is trying to answer some of that with ‘cloud can be the answer,’” Jonathan says. “You may not be very far on your journey today, but you don’t necessarily have to go through all the steps or through all the steps in the journey that someone else did if they took 10 years to get here. Maybe cloud can help you jump ahead to where you want to be.”
François Schlub, Sales Executive
Juliann agrees that cloud seems to be helping people overcome some of the initial obstacles that have delayed companies from really diving into the processes. François points out what’s interesting is who’s the most likely to make the move. It’s not the largest companies, the OEMs, the automotive or A&D types, but their suppliers. “I definitely see in their supply chain, he says, “smaller companies, companies who may have important legacy systems maybe are not building PLM so far or just have PDM. They are seeing an amount of traction on cloud.” At the same time, Jonthan relates something a Dassault representative said in an on-prem-focused session: “We’re committed to both. No one is here telling you that on-prem is going away. We’re here to support this. We like this path. We like on cloud path.”
Given the theme of the conference—Supercharge Your PLM with AI-Powered Virtual Twin Experiences—AI was front and center. For Jonathan, the biggest point he wants people to hear, and that he believes Dassault Systèmes’ wanted people to hear, is that to get the evolving and integrated AI capabilities, Dassault wants you on cloud. He explains, “To get the value that you want out of that, you need the compute power. And the compute power comes from cloud.” Andrew brought up hearing more about the theory behind the AI than how to use it, and the point of that was proving how AI’s going to help manufacturers scale, which he agrees leads back to cloud. “They’re saying, talk about the scalability of it, he says. “But in order to be scalable, it’s going to be a cloud offering. There’s no way, unless you’re a massive, massive Fortune 10 organization, you’re going to be able to afford and keep up with scalability without going to cloud to use that AI.”
The Buzz from Customers
While AI was popular in sessions, François says it was not the primary topic of networking conversations. Instead, people compared notes on how to move to a new generation of a PLM, how to migrate data, how to integrate between PLM and other systems, and more. He was also pleased to hear many people talking about organizational change management. “I saw some very large companies doing massive transformation projects. And they are very well aware of what means, what is the impact on the system, the people, and the process—and how much I should be investing and what method I should consider regarding organizational change management,” he explains. “That was something that was maybe overlooked for many years. This is becoming something more serious now and it’s more valuable for all companies, at least now. It failed the past, and now they are paying attention to it.”
Learn More About the ENOVIA User Conference
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including the roadmaps Dassault Systèmes’ has for everyone to get to Generation 7 of the 3DEXPERIENCE product, what customer use cases most impressed the Razorleaf team, how you can learn from Ford’s mantra of “many to one” to streamline your own processes, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 129: ENOVIA 2026 User Conference Wrap Up and join us each week for a new podcast.
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