Dassault Systemes wants to be the operating system for Industrial AI in India

For most Indians, the word Dassault still relates to aviation. It evokes fighter jets and defence deals. Ravikiran Pothukuchi, Director – Enterprise Apps, Dassault Systemes India, knows the confusion well. 

According to him, Dassault Systemes is trying to empower India with something much broader than aircraft lineage. It wants to become the invisible software spine on which modern industry designs and tests prototypes, collaborates and manufactures products at scale. Where Indian industry operates and automates with cutting edge AI in never before seen ways.

As Pothukuchi puts it, Dassault Systemes isn’t pitching another enterprise application. It is pitching the thing under the applications. Pothukuchi frames the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as a kind of industrial iOS or Android operating system, where it isn’t merely one tool, but a common environment where tools become more valuable because they talk to each other.

“3D experience platform is very analogous to your operating system like Android or iOS, right? It is like an operating system to an organization,” he explains.

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A modern product company no longer merely designs a thing, sends it to manufacturing, and waits for applause. It simulates performance, manages suppliers, traces components, coordinates, and feeds all of that into AI systems. A CAD design file is no longer the centre of the universe, the ecosystem around it is.

Pothukuchi breaks that ecosystem into four industrial essentials: product, process, people, and data. “So 3DEXPERIENCE platform is an operating system where we have grouped applications that are used. You take any company that is in the business of developing a product. Take Mahindra and Mahindra, for instance, when it’s producing a car. And to produce a product, you need people and you need processes and you need power of data, right?”

The software and services integration, in Dassault’s telling, is consolidation without flattening complexity. “We have grouped all the applications like this so that we become an operating system of an organization. So by acquiring the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, any organization in the business of producing products almost instantly has everything that they need to develop their product.”

Think of any new product, not necessarily a car, aircraft or semiconductor chip, and it will need something like 3DEXPERIENCE to do the best possible way, according to Pothukuchi. “Even cosmetics, drugs, any product that you’re producing, ideating, discovering, or inventing, whatever you’re doing, the new product introduction requires these tool sets.”

This is where ENOVIA enters the plot. If 3DEXPERIENCE is the operating system, ENOVIA is the layer where organisations stop behaving like scattered departments and start behaving like one industrial organism, according to Pothukuchi.

Another trend Dassault Systemes is fired up on is representing real places and processes in virtual reality or with their digital representations. Their preferred phrase is not “digital twin” but “virtual twin,” Pothukuchi informs me. 

“Digital twins are a digital representation of what is there. Virtual twins are not just the representation but also a behavioural representation. That means you can not just see them. You can simulate. You can make it move the way the real world would behave. For example, when you hit the body, how it moves, you know, respecting the physics and the motion. All of that is captured well.”

In a world obsessed with metaverse hangovers, this is a useful corrective. The industrial metaverse was never about cartoon meetings. It was about crashing cars without crashing cars, testing factories before building them, and predicting asset failure before things catch fire in real life and smoke appears.

The automotive example makes this less abstract. “Let’s take Mahindra and Mahindra. Their entire new product development happens on our platform. They use all of it, the entire 3DEXPERIENCE platform. They use applications from design, they use it for sourcing collaboration, supplier collaboration, and onboarding suppliers early into their new product design phase,” emphasises Pothukuchi.

Dassault’s India story is therefore not merely a sales story. It is also an engineering-capability story. “India is the second largest entity globally. We have 5,000 people together. Pune campus houses almost 4,000 people”

And the mandate is not back-office maintenance. “All the new technology, you name it, gets developed out of India. So India is the key tech building ground for Dassault Systemes globally.”

The next layer, inevitably, is AI. Pothukuchi’s view is sober rather than apocalyptic. “Today we have AI that can accelerate, automate innovation, augment people, not replace people, right? That’s how we look at AI.”

Soon, Dassault Systèmes’ own AI agents will sit inside this industrial operating system. “Yes, we are using AI. In a few months time, we are going to launch AI agents. We call them virtual companions and they become companions to the people. For example, there is a designer, he will have a companion and that companion will do a lot of work for him.”

That is the real ambition of Dassault Systemes in India, at least what I could gather from my conversation with Ravikiran Pothukuchi. Not just to build another app or an intelligent dashboard, but a workbench capable of doing all the heavy lifting for the industry’s digital future. 

The battle is no longer about digitising one department. It is about synchronising imagination, physics, factories, data and judgement into one loop. Dassault Systemes wants to own that loop. And if India is serious about building more of the world’s next products, that loop may matter far more than any individual industry or sector that Dassault Systemes operates in.

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