What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Unlocking Commercial Innovation with Dassault Systems
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
When software and hardware collide, manufacturing undergoes a fundamental transformation. In this revealing conversation with Tom from Dassault Systems, we explore how the digital revolution is reshaping product development, marketing, and the customer experience.
At the heart of this evolution are three key technological forces: software-defined products that adapt to user needs, AI that streamlines design and personalization, and spatial computing that immerses teams in virtual environments. Together, they're creating a new paradigm where product development becomes a continuous flow rather than a series of discrete annual launches.
The implications are profound. Products can now be revealed earlier and evolve continuously through over-the-air updates. Time-to-market shrinks from weeks to potentially minutes as digital platforms eliminate traditional bottlenecks. Virtual twins—comprehensive digital replicas spanning from molecular structures to production systems—enable unprecedented precision and intelligence throughout the value chain.
Perhaps most fascinating is Dassault Systems' vision of sustainability through adaptation. Rather than consuming more resources to create more products, their mission focuses on creating products that deliver greater value by serving multiple purposes for different users. It's a refreshing perspective that challenges the linear scaling model dominant in manufacturing today.
Whether you're interested in product design, manufacturing innovation, or the future of consumer technology, this conversation offers valuable insights into how today's most sophisticated virtual tools are reshaping our physical world. Listen to discover how the convergence of software and hardware is creating products that don't just serve our needs but understand and anticipate them.
Growth marketing tips & tech insights from those who’ve done it.
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Hey everybody, Really excited for this chat today with Dassault Systems. We're talking unlocking commercial innovation with a true innovator and thought leader in the field. Tom, how are you?
Speaker 2:Hello Evan, I'm very well. Thank you, great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here. Big fan of Dassault Systems, I had the chance to meet you guys at Mobile World Congress just last week and, of course, ces and you have so much going on Before that. Maybe introduce to those who aren't familiar with Dassault Systems and the good work you're doing. Maybe introduce yourself and the team.
Speaker 2:Sure. So Dassault System is, I would say, one of the most hidden champions uh here in europe for software, uh, software business. Um, we really help people in business create virtual worlds for real life. So we you probably every single plane you've ever flown in was probably engineered using our software. Um, I think, uh, the vast majority of electric vehicles which are being developed on the planet today are being developed using our software, in fact using the latest version of our software, which is called the 3D Experience Platform. And you know we cover very many domains around that area of design, engineering of products, simulation of product behavior in the real world. But of course, a big part of any manufacturer's existence is how they take all that engineering goodness and get it into market. So the part of the business that I'm responsible for is a division called 3DXITE, and what we do is we enable all of those manufacturers to use those definitions about what products are all about, to present and represent that benefit in the public space and take those products to market.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, you have a really unique bird's eye view of what's happening across the commercial engineering innovation world. So what are some of the trends that you're seeing for this year across the spectrum? What's exciting for you and the team?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot going on and, of course, while our focus is on enabling people to design and engineer products, those products exist in the context of our technological landscape. So, when we look at what are the big trends that are just happening all around us, which are shaping the way the products are engineered, but also shaping the way that those products ultimately deliver value to consumers, to patients, even to citizens If we're talking about land, you know infrastructure developments I think it's really three main ones that are sort of coloring the landscape right now. The first one we would call broadly software defined products. The first one we would call broadly software-defined products. So this is the idea that physical goods are becoming increasingly intelligent and able to adapt themselves using software which is baked into the definition of the products so that it can respond better to serve the needs of the people that it's been designed for.
Speaker 2:And I think the second one, which is really coloring the landscape right now, clearly is about AI, not only from the perspective of how products are presented and we can get into that a bit more detail maybe but also how they're developed. And then I think the final one, which is sort of a combination of those two things is really that area of spatial computing where often it's very, very valuable for people who are thinking about the future, or a future interaction scenario that they want to bring to life, to be able to actually put themselves in the shoes of the person who's ultimately going to encounter a future product, and that's something which has really, I think, come on dramatically in the last year, and just a few weeks ago we were very excited to launch a collaboration with Apple to actually bake spatial computing capabilities into our 3D experience platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was quite a blockbuster announcement and we'll talk about that. But on this theme of software eating the world, which as the old saying goes what does it mean for businesses and the way they operate and develop products? How have this shift to software-to-prime products changed? The traditional way of designing and building products.
Speaker 2:So I think you know I'll answer first that question about software eating the world and then I'll come on to answer your broader question about what's it doing, sort of, for the commercial part of that equation. You know, I think when we talk about software versus hardware they're often put on two different planes and they're sort of this either or type dialectic. Reality is, when we talk about software defined products, often some of the benefits that software can bring in the context of product use is really very closely anchored to the design of the product itself. So, for example, to understand what's going on through a stream of sensor data, you have to understand where that sensor is situated and you have to understand how that sensor can interact with information coming from another sensor to perhaps create a completely new data point. So when we talk about software eating the world in the context of software-defined products, it's really important, I think, to see that this is a blend and not an either or um. And the second thing, I think, to answer your question what is it doing to business? You know, um I talked a little bit about how 3d excite um is, uh is positioned inside that manufacturing value chain.
Speaker 2:When it comes to the moment for revealing the value of a product to a final customer and traditionally the cadence of that has been driven by, let's say, the model year release in the car industry or the launch cycle that you might have in a high-tech product, which is typically annual right, and that's been really the modus operandi in many industries. You mentioned CES. Of course we all go to CES every year and then there's this huge swathe of new product announcements that come out and then there'll be the motor shows and there'll be the air shows around the world and the way that those products have been introduced to market traditionally has been around that sort of yearly, maybe half yearly if you're going really fast type of cadence. The minute you start to introduce software into the equation, that becomes a continuum because you are constantly releasing new capabilities over the air typically which enhance the material that's inside the product to better mesh with the needs of the person that's going to use it. So you're getting out of that process of just launching once and you're getting into a process of continual launch and of course actually that agility to be able to constantly improve and extend upon the value you're delivering through your product actually even extends upstream a little bit.
Speaker 2:Once you've accepted you're going to have to do that you tend to try to be in a position where you can reveal the product even before it's fully baked, because once you've got the agility, there's no penalty really for going a little early.
Speaker 2:What we found in those linear processes is that there's been a lot of reliance on the past, on say well, I'm only going to do this once, so I'll just accept certain lack of continuity, certain inefficiencies in the process, whereas when you can no longer accept that, you then actually unlock a whole load of other opportunities, like maybe launching the product nine months earlier than you would even have done in the past, because now you have that ability to project the value very rapidly into market and therefore, as soon as you can do that, you reveal it. You might not sell it yet, but you're already starting to build demand, already starting to show customers the future potential of the product, getting them interested. And the moment that you can transact, because you are in that position to be able to release it, you're just that much better placed in market. So it's about timing, it's about agility and of course also about the amount of value the product can deliver to somebody if it's really well meshed to meet their needs.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, and at the beginning you mentioned spatial computing and VisionOS, amazing technologies. But I remember at the Paris Air Show years and years ago maybe six, seven years ago seeing a demonstration of an aircraft cabin being designed and with DESO software in VR, and it was really. Even that time was groundbreaking. So I mean all these years since. I mean, what role do these technologies play in product development these days?
Speaker 2:So it's true that certain elements of what we might imagine you know the value of being able to immerse yourself in a future design have been possible to realize through other um technology. For for previous technologies with vr and so on, um, I think the the biggest. Let me touch first on where those use cases typically tend to be um. They tend to be actually on the interface between two people. So in an enterprise context you might have somebody who's designing a product. Typically that product is going to be bought by another company. If you're talking about, for example, a robot, and the ability to present the capabilities of that robot to the person who's going to be buying it typically a production engineer or someone who's laying out a line is really really groundbreaking because you're no longer pushing documents and RFQs and things around. There'll be a specification, but now I can actually show you how exactly this particular configuration, this particular selection from my portfolio, is going to exactly meet the needs you're looking for. That's one area, that interface between product design and the customer. The other ones where we've seen lots and lots of interest actually in the market today, is actually in the space of production systems. So if you are, for example, looking at how can I prepare for maintenance operations? I've got my line laid out. I know roughly how I'm going to or very precisely how I'm going to actually operate it. But in any of those scenarios where you have normal operations, there's always exceptions. Something's'm going to actually operate it, but in any of those scenarios where you have normal operations, there's always exceptions. Something's always going to go wrong and so you have a team of people typically whose job it is to go and intervene when there's an incident, and the ability for people to get really into that design of the 2B state it's not yet there of how the line is going to work, and verify that all of the affordances are in place and inside the design to be able to deal with any of those maintenance operations or incident recovery situations. Again, that can be very, very powerful because you've got one person or a group of people designing the nominal line and you've got some other people who are going to come in and now be able to be exposed to that in a very lifelike way.
Speaker 2:So this brings me back to that question about what's the difference, you know, between those previous scenarios you may have seen at the Bourget or Farnborough show and where we are today, and I think one of the things is obviously just about the sheer capabilities of the Apple Vision Pro, specifically in terms of its hardware, in terms of its performance, but also there is something about the fact that this has now entered the realm of being close to consumer.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say it's quite there yet in terms of the price point, in terms of the availability, et cetera, but it's based on the kinds of technology that people are familiar with. It's based on the kinds of technology that are easy to deploy and that makes the accessibility of some of those scenarios that much greater. A lot of those previous mechanisms for doing those kind of immersive experiences were quite tricky to set up and there was a lot of stuff you needed to sort of sort out just before you could even get going. And I think one of the aspects, apart from the amazing capabilities of the device itself, which is important, is the fact that it becomes that much easier to deploy and use, even though at this stage it probably is still something for enterprises and for developers than necessarily for a final consumer.
Speaker 1:So well said. So you talk to and support most of the manufacturers in the world in one way or another. What are they telling you about their interest in AI and in product development, and what's the low-hanging fruit this year?
Speaker 2:So look, I mean AI. It's touching every corner of the process, from the moment you start to sort of put pen to paper and think about how you're going to address needs, all the way through to how you present them. I mean just to touch some upstream processes. I think what it's doing a lot of the time is helping us narrow the target space. So we would still insist really on the interplay between human decision making and, you know, human acumen and these tool chains which allow us to sort of bring into focus the task at hand. So I don't think these things are being completely automated yet and, frankly, personally I hope they never will be. I think this is a best thought of as a mechanism to allow us to get things done, to allow us to be more productive and be more precise, but it's about narrowing the field of the possible. Be more productive and be more precise, but it's about narrowing the field of the possible. If you start off with a blank sheet of paper and you're starting to iterate through possible design solutions for a problem, that can be quite a long-winded process and it's quite useful to narrow the field down to five or six candidates, which you then might then start to spend a bit more time on interactively with tools to get to the level of precision that are needed to move on to manufacturing, and so on, time on, interactively with tools to get to the level of precision that are needed to move on to manufacturing, and so on, at the other end of the scale.
Speaker 2:So leaping over manufacturing and leaping over all of the other things logistics and so on that you might encounter in my domain, where we're talking about how we're taking products to market.
Speaker 2:What we're seeing there is you've got traditionally a situation today where a brand will try to create representative, very exciting, appealing visualizations, representations of what the offer is, so that people can transact, typically online, or just get familiar with what a product, inside the context of a brand, is designed to do.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned earlier, with the increasing speed that we're seeing coming into the mix there, as new features are being introduced into the field all the time, then we need to get a lot, lot faster at doing that. We start to get that agility and then the next thing comes in, which is well, could I now actually be a little bit more focused in terms of the individual? So can I actually start to frame that product, which is very, you know, from a manufacturer, knows very well what that product can do. But how can I express the benefit of that product specifically to you, evan? How could I make it absolutely relevant to your needs right now, at this moment in time? So we're seeing a lot around casting a general value proposition into a highly local one, maybe even a highly personalized one, and I think that's really been, as we've gone through these iterations in the last year or so. That seems to be the point of focus right now, because it's addressing an existing need today, but it's also adding value.
Speaker 1:Brilliant and I love some of the work you do in the shoe or sneaker technology world in that regard around personalization, customization, time to market amazing technology going into that world these days as an example curtain in terms of what you're doing internally on your roadmap and innovation on the product and platform that you deliver. What's uh, what's on your radar?
Speaker 2:this year? What's coming up? Well, as a product company, you know it's always a tricky question to answer. We don't like to look too far into the future, but I'll tell you something that's coming up that's very exciting, that we're going to be doing next week, in fact, at the nvidia gt GTC. So we'll be presenting some product which has been in market for over a year now, which allows customers to put the equity of their product definition into the hands of retailers and what we call the value network.
Speaker 2:So the distributors, the people who are helping introduce the product to market and make people who are closest to market, be able to create the sort of promotional material, create the sort of guidance that might be relevant in those local markets, you know, using the deterministic or the actual representation of the product. So you could think about a dealer, for example, in a dealer network of the car industry, being able to create their own localized representations of a promotion that they're currently running, while without losing the accuracy of the way that the product is represented. Add some AI to that and you get to where we'll be next week be able to see next week how we can then take that artistically created representation, which is obviously derived from or automatically generated from the product definition. And now you can say, okay, I like that, but you know what? I want to see the sun shining, or I want to see this in a night situation, I want to see this, and we'll do that without destroying the representational value of the product, because that actually is a contract.
Speaker 2:So whenever we're showing something about a product which they can buy, it's really important that we don't lie. And what we're trying to do there and you'll see this next week, I think it's quite differentiated in that regard is say, yes, maximum flexibility in how we position the product, how we stage it, how we make it relevant to you, but let's be sure that what we're introducing into the public space is actually true. And I think there's a bigger piece to that conversation which I think we all need to have to a certain extent is what are we actually putting into the public internet space and how can we tell what's stuff which is fake and what stuff which is, at least to our best knowledge and intent can be relied upon? And that's really the fine line that we're trying to navigate at the moment is to have that ground truth present, even as we tell very individualized, very unique stories to people in their everyday lives Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll be watching GTC streaming online, so look forward to seeing more. One thing that really intrigued me last week at Mobile World Congress was the work you're doing in virtual twins. I haven't seen this done anywhere else. Tell us more about the big idea behind virtual twinsins and how you're you know introducing those practically into different industries.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean Virtual Twins are really at the heart of what Dicey System does and the idea there is really to bring together all of that work, product that engineers, designers, production system engineers, people who are building out different aspects of the production process, even frankly, into life science as well. So when we start talking about how particular molecules are developed for treating certain diseases or how those molecules then end up actually being put into a production process so they can be made at scale, you've got virtual twins all over the place in that context. But the idea is to be able to go from the nano scale, where you're talking about very, very set molecular, small scale things, up to the product scale, up to the production system scale and ultimately out to the experiences. The idea is to really try to engineer those interactions and those things partially and I think this is comes back to something we were just talking about in the context of ai to also be able to learn reliably from them, because it's one thing, obviously, to have the value of a source of truth, which means the business can operate because we all know what we're talking about and we can sort of bypass some of the confusion that inevitably happens in those complicated processes with lots of people involved. But ultimately, where this is leading to is also the ability to generate additional intelligence from all those processes because they've been well captured and sometimes, when we see how AI is being talked about, it's sort of papering over some of the things that we've always, you know, perhaps learned to live with in the past. Virtual twins is really about a systematic approach and being precise from a systematic approach turns out to be a big unlock also for a generative approach where you're using all of that canonical information to reliably project future value.
Speaker 2:So, as I was talking about, you know, virtual twins, we kind of think about them often when we encounter them in the public space as a 3D representation, right Even. Probably many people have experienced looking at a piece of furniture they've been maybe browsing around on Amazon and they pull it into their environment and they can see what that's like. Some of that technology, by the way, was actually invented by us no-transcript, your web. So that is actually open sourced and introduced to the wider world because it has a societal value. Sorry, a bit of a segue there, but this is kind of where we come into virtual twins, I guess, as consumers.
Speaker 2:But if you go upstream and you start to think about how products are designed again, we start with mechanical thoughts like how do things fit together? How do these different parts of a larger system interplay? And then we very quickly realize actually a virtual twin also could be the systems model, so not just the mechanical but also the functional, the logical elements of that overall design. So there are many different angles of attack on virtual twins. Our unique approach is really the fact that we try to be scientific and we try to be precise about these things so that they can be relied upon and ultimately, so that they can add more intelligence as we move forward using generative techniques.
Speaker 1:Wow, very, very smart approach, and it seems like all of this is leading to the net benefit of reducing time to market for new products. How do you quantify that exactly? What does it mean for the customer?
Speaker 2:Also, time to market also mean adaptability of the product, because when you can get when the time to market is, it literally adapt itself to you. You kind of get to a point where time to market is zero. Right, and I think that's the sort of limit of the integral which we're aiming for is literally, time to market is zero because it will change as you, as your needs, change A little bit. Sci fi that. Let's get back to what it means today. Sci-fi there. Let's get back to what it means today.
Speaker 2:If I can cut six weeks out of the process that it takes to go from my engineering model to a representation of the product as it's best understood from engineering perspective in front of the customer, so let's take that model and put it on a website. Six weeks gone, that's a saving. It's a nice saving. But if I then say, well, I'm now taking six weeks down to a few hours, maybe it'll be within the near future, just minutes what that does is it reduces the friction that's inbuilt in the traditional process. So you then start to think you know what? Now I can afford to go six months earlier because I don't have to worry about having to update that 10 times. It's going to cost me six weeks, each time I'll go with the best I've got.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to promise somebody that's exactly what they're going to receive, because that would be a lie, but I'm going to show them. This is what I know about the product today, and you can already start to express an interest. You can start to even implicitly, give me some feedback on what you think, and then we can start to iterate around that loop much quicker. As I mentioned, ultimate progression of that is the product will even start to adapt itself to your needs. You know whether you're going on a trip with your family, on, you know, a ski trip or something, or just across town. The product should really understand what it is you're trying to do and slightly adjust its behavior accordingly.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, so you're helping your clients obviously deal with lots of change and disruption in the market, but you're also changing internally. You've overhauled your business model and you've introduced cloud native architectures that was quite a bit of work over the years. Tell us more about what that's like.
Speaker 2:That's been a huge, huge endeavor the last few years because obviously a lot of these changes we've been discussing today really ladder up to a different kind of value chain.
Speaker 2:So if you're delivering value continuously and you are looking at products more as a, you know, not just as a service but as an experience, ultimately we needed to find a business model that was actually going gonna go back to back with the business model of our customers. So long as we're thinking about inputs and outputs in a sort of traditional manufacturing context, you can sell licenses, they can put labor in there, they get a result. But once we start to talk about that continuum, we really need to be able to be put an offer on the table which says I will work with you in terms of the technology that we provide, but maybe even some of the support infrastructure we provide in terms of expertise and operations. We will make sure that your product is represented in the way it should be at any one given moment in time. It's a different type of value proposition entirely and you can imagine that the business engineering that's necessary to make that shift is almost as complex as the coding.
Speaker 1:I bet no small task. So just to wrap up, where do you see the team going over the course of this year, the next few years, both in terms of your mission, but also some of the trends impacting that in terms of commercial innovation?
Speaker 2:So I think it's a very broad question. It's a good one. We're really, I think, at a tipping point in many respects because of some of those technologies that we've been talking about, so I think there's going to be quite a significant well, I hope there's going to be significant growth to what we're doing for our business, but I also think that the impact that we're able to deliver to our customers customer should hopefully increase. Let me explain that a little bit.
Speaker 2:One of the things that we are motivated by, and one of the things that really is part of our purpose, is the idea that we need to sort of get out of this linear scaling idea in in manufacturing industries, particularly where we just do more and you just create more, we just create more, demand more stuff, and you know it's all about horizontal scale.
Speaker 2:There's clearly a lot of externalities associated with that which are not too good for the planet. So one of the things that we're really excited about is more a question of how can I create more value without actually expending more resources, and that's really one of the things that I think both AI and, in fact, the software-defined vehicle paradigm or software-defined product paradigm can help with, because if a bunch of atoms, ultimately cleverly constructed in a certain way, can be made to do a whole load of different things for different people, they will be more valuable to more people. So if we could actually increase the value that these products deliver to people by being very closely tied to their needs, I think that's the other half of the sustainability equation with respect to just expending less of the planet's resources, and that's really how I see the 3DXITE mission in the context of the DASO system imperative to try to help industry overall achieve a different type of value equation with respect to the planet.
Speaker 1:Wow, wonderful mission. Quite a mic drop moment. So we'll end on that. Thanks so much, Tom, for joining and good luck with the continued mission. It's really amazing to watch.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Evan. It's been great to talk to you today.
Speaker 1:Thanks everyone for listening, watching and sharing. Take care.