There are many concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) will take away jobs, but mid-sized and small manufacturers in Korea are instead struggling because they cannot find skilled workers.
Bae Jae-in, Deputy Minister of customer experience institutional sector (CRE) at Dassault Systèmes Korea, said at the "3D Experience World 2026" event held in Houston in February that "AI will not replace jobs but can instead serve as a means to supplement the labor shortage facing domestic manufacturing sites," and stated accordingly. At the event, Dassault Systèmes said it would join hands with Nvidia to implement an "industrial world model" applicable to industrial sites and unveiled three industry-specialized AI agents.
Dassault Systèmes, headquartered in France, is a software corporations leading 3D CAD (computer-aided design) and AI-based virtual twin technology. A virtual twin is a technology that replicates real factories and manufacturing processes as they are in a virtual space. It creates a "twin" of real-world objects in a virtual space, runs simulations, and uses them to predict results in advance to optimize products and services.
Deputy Minister Bae leads the domestic business of SolidWorks, Dassault Systèmes' core design platform. On why Dassault Systèmes is focusing on the Korean market, he said, "Korea is a manufacturing powerhouse, and Dassault Systèmes' main business is solutions for manufacturing, so we consider the Korean market important." He said, "In fact, Korea is almost the only country with manufacturing capabilities across diverse fields from semiconductors to automobiles, shipbuilding, and batteries, and because responses to new solutions are fast, it also serves as a test bed to validate products before expanding to the global market."
He saw AI contributing to improving production efficiency at domestic mid-sized and small manufacturers with short development cycles, such as semiconductor equipment companies. Deputy Minister Bae said, "On domestic shop floors, design often fails to keep up with production requests, leading to accumulated rework that increases expense and lowers efficiency," and explained that using AI agents can shorten design time and, through pre-verification, reduce errors in the production stage.
He cited robots and life sciences as domestic industries where AI's role is expected to grow this year. Deputy Minister Bae said, "Life science products, including medical robots, face heavy regulations by country, and AI will help by identifying such regulations from the early development stage to reduce related risks," adding that Dassault Systèmes' engineering-specialized AI agent "Leo," slated for official release soon, and the science-specialized AI agent "Marie" will also detect errors or risks in advance to support corporations' go-to-market strategies, exports, and business expansion.
Dassault Systèmes said it will continue to support the digital transformation (DX) and AI transformation (AX) of Korean corporations. Deputy Minister Bae said, "DX and AX at domestic mid-sized and small manufacturers have not yet been sufficiently achieved," and added, "Rather than applying a massive industrial solution from the start, we will help manage data based on cloud solutions and pursue a gradual transition."