How 3M AI Tools Accelerate How Ideas Become Products
Originally published on 3M News Center
Across industries, engineers often begin the process of developing new products with a simple yet important question: How can I make this?
Answering that question requires a significant investment of time and resources and leads to many design and testing cycles. The opportunity to simplify and accelerate the design process inspired 3M to introduce two digital innovations: Ask 3M and the 3M Digital Materials Hub.
Ask 3M is a new AI-powered digital assistant that helps customers find solutions to design challenges using 3M's vast portfolio of adhesives and tapes. The 3M Digital Materials Hub, which initially launched last year, is expanding to enable direct collaboration with 3M scientists through the Workbench feature and power virtual materials sampling—including the option to explore generative solutions that don't yet exist.
These tools leverage generative AI, advanced modeling, and simulation-ready data cards to speed the introduction of solutions for 3M customers. They’ll help users, especially those at small and medium-sized businesses, identify the right material, to design and digitally validate materials before investing in physical prototypes.
“In fast moving industries like electronics, automotive, and data centers, speed is essential. Our combined digital and material capabilities are helping our customers stay ahead,” said Chris Goralski, group president of the 3M Safety and Industrial Business Group. “Our goal is to enable faster, more confident decision making so customers can integrate the right 3M materials in their designs and get to market sooner.”
Ask 3M is being piloted to engineers solving bonding design challenges utilizing tapes and adhesives – largely within 3M's Safety & Industrial Business Group. Leveraging Amazon Web Services' (AWS) secure and scalable AI capabilities, including Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore, Ask 3M and the 3M Digital Materials Hub demonstrate how agentic AI and advanced simulation can help 3M customers accelerate innovation cycles, reduce prototyping costs, and bring better products to market faster. Powered by AWS, the AI assistant guides users through substrates, environmental conditions, assembly methods, and performance targets to recommend suitable options, helping teams move from problem to final product more quickly.
“Together, Ask 3M and the 3M Digital Materials Hub allow customers of varying scope and scale to move from design challenge to solution concept then digital selection and simulation in minutes,” said Holly Semerad, chief marketing officer for 3M's Safety & Industrial Business Group. “We can further accelerate the testing timeframe with small quantity purchase options for final and confident prototyping."
The 3M Digital Materials Hub launched last year is user-friendly, enabling easy search, filter and download of material data cards compatible with many leading finite element analysis (FEA) software platforms. The newly expanded 3M Digital Materials Hub now includes Optical Models, which represent 3M optical film performance for use in common simulation environments. Engineers in automotive, consumer electronics, and advanced manufacturing can quickly assess optical behaviors and material tradeoffs earlier in the process, reducing iterations and enabling faster decision-making. In a pilot with select customers, engineers reported that the tool enables seamless use of 3M materials into virtual simulations, accelerating prototyping and design.
The updated platform also enables customers to request bespoke virtual materials—technologies that solve their specific design challenges but don't yet exist. It does this by leveraging 3M's decades of material science and engineering expertise, which means the path to create these unique solutions is already in place and 3M can accelerate their development and delivery.
"With these platforms, 3M is redefining how engineers discover, evaluate, and simulate materials," said Jason Langfield, 3M Digital Materials Hub project lead. "By drawing on 3M's deep technological and application expertise, we can deliver secure, scalable access to mechanical models, optical models and virtual materials, while helping our customers reduce iterations, accelerate decisions, and bring better solutions to market faster."
