Onshape's Jon Hirschtick on The Era of AI-Powered CAD

Before becoming PTC's Chief Evangelist, Jon Hirschtick cofounded the groundbreaking CAD company SolidWorks (acquired by Dassault Systemes in 1997) and later the cloud-hosted CAD startup Onshape (acquired by PTC in 2019). In this episode, he discusses the integration of generative AI in design software, which is quickly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

"Today you won't call me up to talk about the internet on a podcast, but twenty years ago, you might have," said Hirschtick. "Just like that, I think AI will soon become so ubiquitous that it won't be special anymore." 

Jon Hirschtick, Chief Evangelist, PTC, discusses the future of CAD in the era of AI agents. Image courtesy of PTC.

Many mainstream design and simulation software developers are launching their own ChatGPT-like assistants and copilots with natural language support. Autodesk Fusion's copilot and AnsysGPT are just two examples. "Since April, Onshape users, everyone from student users to our highest level pro-plan owners, have access to the Onshape AI Advisor, embedded in everyone's user interface," said Hirschtick.

Since AI chatbots will become a standard feature in CAD programs, the distinguishing factor will be "the quality of the tools," said Hirschtick. Onshape's cloud-native architecture makes it easy to work with collected data to fine-tune the AI agent, he pointed out. "I know our competitors will show you their CAD in a browser, but it's not the entire system," he added.

Hirschtick think's Hollywood's vision of AI-driven design, as exemplified by the fictional AI JARVIS in the movie Iron Man, is quite close to how engineers will use their software in the future. The AI in CAD will be "a companion, accelerator, collaborator," he reasoned. "You might say, this surface doesn't look right. Can you make it smoother? And most likely, the AI will give you several options ... But the AI tools won't be replacing you, or your entire team." 

In Onshape, the software can create design branches to explore, before you adopt some of the software-proposed edits and merge them with the original design. 

Asked to comment on what the design software industry is doing right and wrong, he said, "It's kind of embarrassing that we're the only cloud native systems. It's embarrassing for our industry that there's really only one ... I think we have to wake up from the release cycle mentality. The idea of annual releases or semi annual releases is too slow. We need to pursue agile release cycles."

For more on Hirschtick's vision of AI-powered CAD, please listen to the podcast.