About Ajei Gopal
Ajei Gopal, President and CEO of Ansys, received the ASME Foundation Excellence in Industry Award in May 2025. In accepting the award, Gopal described his leadership style as having three aspects: bringing outside perspectives into the organization, making decisions in a way that engages others, and communicating frequently. He stated that Ansys' mission is "to power innovation that drives human advancements" and highlighted the company's work with NASA and Northrop on the James Webb Telescope. Gopal also discussed a startup called Circleg that uses Ansys software to convert plastic waste into low-cost prosthetics, and expressed support for the ASME Foundation's goal of expanding access to engineering education.
In earlier appearances, Gopal has discussed the role of simulation in autonomous vehicle development, stating that validating autonomous cars would require physically driving over eight billion miles and that this "cannot be achieved without the use of simulation." He noted that Ansys is working with BMW to develop a simulation tool chain for testing autonomous driving systems. Gopal has also described simulation as "our superpower" and said that multiphysics simulation gives engineers the ability to "see inside a product and instantly grasp the physics behind it." He has characterized the fourth Industrial Revolution as involving the integration of digital technologies into industries such as automotive, and has said that the cloud is making simulation more accessible, particularly as engineers work from home.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Ajei Gopal's recent appearances.
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Transcript (3 segments)
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Host0:00
We are thrilled to be honoring Ansys President and CEO Ajei Gopal with the Excellence In Industry Award.
I want to congratulate you, Ajei, as a leader in technology innovation.
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Ajei Gopal0:14
Ansys is a global software company. We build engineering simulation software. Our mission statement is to power innovation that drives human advancements, and our tools and our technologies and our capabilities, we believe, are essential to our customers as they drive innovation to the marketplace. When I think about leadership and I think about my own style, there are three aspects of it. One is not being insular, but being able to bring the outside in. In other words, I like to collect information that is not just from within an organization, but what people from outside of an organization might be saying. The second is make decisions effectively, but do so in a manner that engages the people around you. And the third is to communicate, communicate, communicate. So that ability to bring people from different backgrounds, from different perspectives, who have a different way of thinking about the problem, makes us a stronger company. What excites me about Ansys products is the innovation that it unlocks in our customers. We worked with NASA and with the engineers at Northrop on the James Webb Telescope. The engineering that was involved in taking that mirror and then flying it a million miles from Earth is an incredible feat of engineering. So one of the things that I found particularly exciting in the last few years is that there's a tsunami of startup companies that have been created around the world. Just given the advancements across all of the fields of engineering, and certainly the availability of tools such as Ansys, these engineers can go out and start their own companies, chasing their own dream. Circleg was a company that was started by two engineers who were looking at the issue of plastic waste. So their idea was to take plastic waste and to convert it into low-cost prosthetics. And they use Ansys. They use Ansys Mechanical, they use Ansys Granta for materials, and they were able to come together and create a solution for low-cost prosthetics, and simultaneously it deals with the issue of plastic waste. Our customers come to us all the time and say, we need more engineering talent. Where can we find engineers? The work of the ASME Foundation to increase the pool of availability of qualified engineers is a great thing for Ansys and for companies like us. And I think that the goal of the ASME Foundation is to make sure that deserving candidates are able to get access to what they need, whether it's K through 12 or certainly at the university level. So we feel very connected to that, and we very much support that objective of making sure that there are as many people as possible who are qualified, who can have access to that engineering education. It's a real privilege and an honor for me to receive the Excellence In Industry Award from ASME. I'm excited and proud of the long-term partnership between Ansys and ASME that has brought us together. Better engineering talent can only help to make the world a better place.
