NAFEMS Americas 2026: How Engineering Teams are Integrating Agents and AI Physics into CAE Workflows

At the 2026 NAFEMS Americas conference, the focus on AI for digital engineering highlighted its transition from exploratory discussions to practical deployment, with a significant portion of the program dedicated to AI's implementation in engineering workflows. The conference underscored the growing importance of agentic engineering, emphasizing the need for responsible deployment of autonomous agents that assist rather than replace human decision-making. Key discussions revolved around the challenges of integrating AI into existing workflows, particularly in terms of data accessibility and governance, with practitioners favoring narrow use cases such as error detection and job orchestration. Rescale played a prominent role, presenting on agentic workflows and AI Physics infrastructure, showcasing AI-first engineering applications and unveiling their AI Physics OS for developing and governing surrogate models. The event also highlighted a widening gap between teams with robust cloud-native infrastructures and those still in early experimental stages, with data readiness and trust at the workflow level identified as critical factors for successful AI adoption in engineering.