Does My Current Desktop SOLIDWORKS CAD Have Any AI-Related Features?

With the advancement and popularity of AI in recent times, a question many might ask is if their Desktop SOLIDWORKS CAD has any AI-related features and how they can leverage them in their daily work.

To answer this before the anticipated arrival of a possible generative A.I. and M.I. integration with 3DEXPERIENCE Cloud & SOLIDWORKS on the horizon, we can take a step back and check out a variety of useful design-related assistants and tools (which you could consider as some narrow forms of Assistive, Predictive and Reactive Machine AI) that are already present inside our desktop SOLIDWORKS CAD program, which has been around for close to 30 years as of 2025!

In this blog, we will be looking at a list of what we can consider as “AI” assistants and tools in SOLIDWORKS CAD and how each can help you in your day-to-day SOLIDWORKS design efficiency and productivity, there might be some you may not have even have known about…

SOLIDWORKS Xpert Tools

Known collectively as “SWIFT”—SolidWorks Intelligent Feature Technology, was introduced ahead of its time, over a decade ago, its goal was to eliminate the need for users to learn how a 3D CAD software “thinks,” and enable a SolidWorks software user to become an expert from the start!

It includes a set of ‘Xpert’ tools that enhances user experience by solving design problems and automating complex CAD tasks; allowing users to focus on design rather than mastering software related-process intricacies.

Listed below are some of the Xpert tools with SWIFT:

Find out more on these in our SOLIDWORKS Training Courses and Advanced Skill Building Classes.

SOLIDWORKS Sensors

Sensors  can be setup to monitor selected properties of your SOLIDWORKS Parts and Assemblies to alert you or others when certain values deviate from the limits specified, providing a layer of assurance for designers that their critical design related criteria and requirements are still met.

Listed below are the types of Sensors available:

When a sensor triggers an alert, the sensor is flagged in the SOLIDWORKS FeatureManager design tree!

E.g.:

Find out more by attending our SOLIDWORKS Assembly Training Course.

Contextual Selection and Toolbars

Contextual Selections  reduces your time spend on selecting entities, allowing for groups of related entities to be selected together. Different types of group selections are available depending on what entity is selected and what entities are adjacent to it.

There are three main types of contextual selection: Select Loop, Select Tangency and Select Chain

Edge Selection (Toolbars):

E.g.: When manually adding or editing constant and variable radius fillets, a pop-up toolbar can be enabled in the feature property manager to help you select multiple similar groups of edges!

Find out more by attending our SOLIDWORKS Training Courses and Advanced Skill Building Classes.

SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler

The SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler is a very useful application that offers a variety of different tasks that help you cut down your working time and effort spent on tedious and repetitive tasks, or time and resource intensive tasks.

They can be performed on the spot or be scheduled at a later time or off-peak hours, certain tasks can also be allocated to a different computer resource within your network to enable you to keep on working as per normal while they are running elsewhere.

It can be accessed from your computer’s windows Start Menu > SOLIDWORKS Tools 20XX version > SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler 20XX version.

Listed below are some of the available tasks and their functions:

Some recommended and daily tasks you can start utilizing in your daily workflow:

• Bulk exporting of files to another file format (e.g. PDFs, STEPs, STLs, PNGs).
• Bulk creation of drawings from your SolidWorks parts/assemblies with predefined templates.
• Bulk update of custom properties for a set of files.
• Bulk importing of neutral 3D file formats and converting to SOLIDWORKS Files.

Note you will need a SOLIDWORKS Professional or SOLIDWORKS Premium license to be able to access and perform all the Task Scheduler tasks available.

SOLIDWORKS Design Checker

The SOLIDWORKS Design Checker helps you to verify design elements such as dimensioning standards, fonts, materials, and sketches to ensure that SOLIDWORKS documents meet pre-defined design criteria.

It is a SOLIDWORKS add-in    that can be enabled. After it has been enabled, the Design Checker can be accessed from the menu’s Tools > Design Checker.

To automate your verification process further, you can take advantage of the SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler’s Design Checker task to perform bulk checks once your standards files have been created.

Compiled in the picture below are some of the checks it can perform for your files and data:

Note you require a SOLIDWORKS Professional or SOLIDWORKS Premium license to be able to use SOLIDWORKS Design Checker.

Import Diagnostics

Import Diagnostics   repairs faulty surfaces, knits repaired surfaces into closed bodies, and makes closed bodies into solids. It is particularly useful when importing neutral 3D file formats (e.g. STEP, IGES, STL) or other native CAD file formats to your SOLIDWORKS CAD software.

This is a very powerful and efficient tool in SOLIDWORKS CAD for rectifying your imported files and data if mastered on how you can use it and along with other relevant tools to the fullest.

Import Diagnostics can be accessed when you first import a file if you have its auto-run setting enabled, or by right-clicking the imported feature in the design tree. It can also be found under Tools > Evaluate > Import Diagnostics.

Find out more by attending our SOLIDWORKS Advanced Skill Building Classes.

FeatureWorks

After importing neutral or other native 3D CAD file formats, FeatureWorks   can be utilized to assist with recognizing and generating features from an imported solid body in a SOLIDWORKS Part file.

The recognized features are the same types of features that you would create using the SOLIDWORKS software (e.g. Extrudes, Cuts, Holes, Fillets, etc), basic sheet metal features are also supported.

Once features have been recognized on the imported body, you can edit their feature definition via the SOLIDWORKS FeatureManager design tree to change their parameters, and for sketched-based features, you can edit the sketches to change the geometry of those features.

There are two types of feature recognition methods, Automatic and Interactive.

• The advantage of automatic feature recognition option is that it is fast and does not require you to make any selections of faces or features.(If your part file is a relatively basic and generic solid parametric model, you can use Automatic Feature Recognition to get the fastest results.)

• Interactive feature recognition is a more manual process, but gives you more control over the features that are recognized.(E.g. you can decide if you want to recognize a cylindrical cut as an extrusion, a revolve, or a hole, or you can determine the location and complexity of the sketches of your features by the faces and edges that you select.)

Find out more by attending our SOLIDWORKS Advanced Skill Building Classes.

Fully Define Sketch

The Fully Define Sketch tool in SOLIDWORKS assists you in calculating and adding dimensions and relations for you to fully define any under-defined sketches or selected sketch entities with just a few clicks!

This is great when you have just imported a 2D drawing file over as a sketch or if you have just recognized some sketch-based features with FeatureWorks. Or if you simply want a quick and easy way to input some dimensions and relations to your Sketch.

The Fully Define Sketch tool can be accessed and utilized by:

• Editing an undefined sketch, and selecting  Fully Define Sketch (Dimensions/Relations toolbar) or Tools > Dimensions > Fully Define Sketch.
• • Importing a sketch from .DXF or .DWG drawing files, and going to Tools > Dimensions > Fully Define Sketch.

  Find out more by attending our SOLIDWORKS Training Courses and Advanced Skill Building Classes.

SOLIDWORKS Auto Repair

The Auto Repair   assistant we are looking at here is a relatively new enhancement to SOLIDWORKS in the recent years.

It first appeared in SW2023 in assemblies with the ability to repair a missing mate reference for a component by auto-intelligently selecting a similar reference (e.g. faces, edges, planes, axes, points, reference geometry) on the component that is in the same location and orientation to the missing reference entity.

If you ever encounter an assembly mate error that was likely due to a missing mate reference, you can now quick fix it with the Auto Repair function found in the context toolbar by righting-click the mate feature.

If there are multiple of such errors, you can perform a bulk repair operation by simply selecting the mate’s folder in the tree.

This assistant initial intent was repairing mismatched face IDs after replacing a component in an assembly, which usually causes rebuild errors that need to be rectified manually, reducing productivity and slowing performance.

In SW2024, it was further refined with improvements for Concentric and Parallel mates by adding more criteria for identifying replacement entities. E.g. different diameter but same axis position.

In the same SW2024 release, repairing of missing direction references in linear component patterns and circular component patterns was also made possible.

And in the latest SW2025 release as of writing, you can now find it also in Sketch mode! With the ability to repair dangling sketch relations or dimensions in your 2D Sketches.

Simply click the Auto Repair Sketch Relation or Dimension  icon to repair the selected dangling relation from the context toolbar.

Or via the Display/Delete Relations PropertyManager, you can use “Repair All Dangling” to automatically fix all dangling relations, or manually replace with the Find Replacement interface.

Find out more by browsing in What’s New in SOLIDWORKS 2023-2025 and beyond, attending our current SOLIDWORKS Training Courses, or yearly SOLIDWORKS Innovation Day Event for the latest enhancements and updates.

SOLIDWORKS Command Predictor

One of the newest enhancements in SW2025, the Command Predictor assistant is currently still in beta functionality with tool suggestions based on a machine learning model.

Its current function is to predict the tools that are most relevant based what you are doing and working on your current SOLIDWORKS session, with the purpose of reducing the time that you spend searching for features or tools that you are likely to use next, be it for Part, Assembly or Drawing files.

It can be located in the CommandManager > Command Predictor (beta) tab:

We do expect to see more accurate and useful results being generated and more enhancements in the coming releases.

This is just one of the many newest Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants and Machine Learning (ML) integrations that will be arriving to SOLIDWORKS.

Find out more by looking at What’s New in SOLIDWORKS 2025 and beyond, or by attending our yearly SOLIDWORKS Innovation Day Event for the latest enhancements and updates.

As you have seen, most of the assistants and tools you have seen in this blog have been around for many years, with plenty over a decade.

Do know that there are more out of such that are not listed here within the ecosystem of Desktop SolidWorks products and add-ins.

Such examples showcase the long-standing incorporated use of such forms of so-called “AI” (some narrow forms of Assistive, Predictive and Reactive Machine AI) in SOLIDWORKS by Dassault Systèmes.

Read back on SolidWorks evolution through the years:https://seacadtech.com/blog/solidworks-evolution-through-the-years/

With an ever-increasing benefit and ever-growing demand for AI (Artificial intelligence), Dassault Systèmes and SOLIDWORKS development team are working hard in the background to bring us more and better generative AI tools to reality.

Stay-tuned for the near-future release of Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants and Machine Learning (ML) integrations in Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE Cloud Platform and its applications, including your favourite SOLIDWORKS program!

Read up on what you could expect on the horizon for SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE Platform Cloud:https://seacadtech.com/blog/horizon-of-ai-in-solidworks-and-3dexperience/

Coming soon……