The Business of Simulation…
with Monica Schnitger

Amid a lot of great content, one article in the July 2026 BENCHMARK Magazine caught my eye. It recapped six NAFEMS regional conferences across Europe in the first half of 2026. I’m sorry I missed the events (they sound amazing), but something else struck me as I read the article: only one in five abstracts across all of these events even mentioned artificial intelligence (AI). Yet every year, the vendors’ marketing decks get more strident, with AI-native this, agentic that, foundation models trained on billions of simulation runs, and promises that using the right AI agents will make human-run FEA obsolete. If you only read vendor press releases, you would assume human-created physics-based simulation had already been quietly retired in favor of something newer.

This article appeared in the October 2026 Issue of BENCHMARK.