SimScale opens Engineering AI agent to its global community, helping to attract engineers to hardware and upskill the next wave of talent
SimScale is opening its Engineering AI agent — until now proven with enterprise customers — to its full community of more than 900,000 engineers, designers and students. The agent runs a complete simulation workflow autonomously, from CAD geometry clean-up to validated results report, making work that once required a dedicated specialist routine for any engineer. The release is aimed at drawing talent back into hardware and upskilling the next generation, at a point when demand for hardware engineers is outpacing supply.
MUNICH, Tuesday August 18th, 2026: AI-native cloud simulation platform SimScale releases its simulation AI agent to its community of over 900,000 engineers, designers, and students. The agent will be released to the community today, and can run complete simulation workflows autonomously, from CAD geometry clean-up, to simulation set-up, through to validated output report – elements of the broader agentic workflows SimScale has spent the past year proving with enterprise customers.
The release follows a record year of community growth for SimScale, with over 160,000 professional engineers, hardware designers and students joining the platform within the last year, and more than 100,000 in the first six months of 2026 alone. The community spans over 190 countries, with the largest community in the US, and covers all sectors of the engineering industry, with the built environment and AEC, industrial machinery and equipment, energy, manufacturing, electronics, automotive and aerospace the most heavily represented.
AI adoption in engineering and simulation workflows has doubled in less than a year. This growth has come with a shift in what engineers are using AI-native cloud simulation to do. Platform data shows non-linear mechanical simulation, used across consumer goods, manufacturing, medical devices and advanced structural work, rose 99% in the past 12 months. Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) simulation, common in electronics cooling, heat exchangers, and HVAC, rose 35%. Electromagnetics simulation, used for motors, actuators, sensors, and power electronics, rose 42%. Work that once required a specialist is now routine for engineers who were never trained as simulation experts but are using SimScale to realise the benefits of broad, early and automated simulation use in the hardware design process.
David Heiny
CEO, SimScale
“For most of engineering history, simulation was something a handful of specialists did at the very end of a project, long after the decisions that mattered had already been made. What 900,000 users tell us is that this has flipped. AI-native engineers are testing ideas on day one.”
Integrating agentic AI technologies into simulation processes is also shifting hardware engineering duties away from rising amounts of administration and repetition, automating non-value-added engineering tasks, compressing lead times and enabling thousands of design decisions to take place in seconds. Specifically, a survey of over 350 engineering leaders in organizations showed that Engineering AI is already allowing engineers to increase simulation iteration speed from as low as once a week to multiple times a day, reduce bottlenecks and frustrating wait-times, and increase the number of design variants from as low as 1-5 to over 200, expanding the possibilities engineers can explore.
This is particularly important given Global Tech report warnings that the demand for hardware engineers is outpacing supply, even as the lure of software engineering is cooling – entry-level software engineering job posts fell nearly 30% in the US and UK. To attract engineering talent back into hardware, engineers need the right, frictionless tools.
“When you can explore thousands of design decisions in seconds, time stops being the constraint to innovation, and that changes what an individual engineer can do – whether that’s an experienced engineer in a big organisation, an engineer early-on in their career, or a student building skills,” David says. “We must attract engineers into hardware, which is challenging but rewarding. But most engineers did not choose the profession to draw CAD lines, wrestle with Outlook, or wait two weeks for simulations. They chose it because they wanted to solve the world’s biggest challenges and – to keep and nurture talent and drive innovation as rapidly as we need to – we must enable them to do that. This is why the integration of AI into simulation tools is so critical within engineering organisations. AI is not going to replace hardware engineering jobs; it’s a task tool that will free up engineers to do the work they trained for – and dreamt about – in the first place.”
Gain access to the agent
To gain access to the Engineering AI agent, sign-up below
About SimScale
SimScale is the AI-native cloud platform for engineering simulation. Trusted by more than 900,000 users, SimScale empowers engineers everywhere to innovate faster by exploring 1000’s of engineering decisions in seconds. By integrating Engineering AI agents and Physics AI models with computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA), electromagnetic, and thermal simulation in a single cloud platform, SimScale empowers teams to engineer the irreplaceable. For more information, visit www.simscale.com.
SimScale is a registered trademark of SimScale GmbH. All other trademarks not owned by SimScale GmbH are the property of their respective owners.
Media contact: marketing@simscale.com
