Manufacturing & Engineering
Private AI for technical knowledge on the shop floor and in the office.
Engineering teams depend on drawings, specifications, procedures and maintenance history. Private AI can help people find and use that knowledge faster, without sending sensitive technical information to public AI services.
Use cases
Key AI use cases
Practical starting points that work with the documents your teams already rely on.
Technical document search
Ask questions across specifications, standards, manuals and work instructions, and see which documents an answer came from.Maintenance knowledge
Bring fault histories, service reports and equipment manuals together so engineers can find previous fixes more quickly.Procedure drafting
Prepare first drafts of standard operating procedures, inspection checklists and change notes for an engineer to review.Quality records
Summarise non-conformance reports and corrective actions to help quality teams spot recurring issues.
Who it helps
Built around the people doing the work
Who it helps
- Maintenance and production engineers
- Quality and compliance teams
- Design and project engineers
- Operations and plant managers
Challenges we often hear
- Knowledge held by a few experienced people and hard to pass on
- Manuals, procedures and records spread across shared drives and systems
- Drawings and specifications that cannot be shared with public AI tools
- Time lost searching for the right revision of a document
How it works
From a question on the floor to an answer you can check
An example of how an engineer might use a private assistant during a maintenance task.
Your information
- Specifications and standards
- Equipment manuals
- Maintenance and fault records
- Procedures and work instructions
Private AI environment
- Hosted in an environment you control
- Searches only what each user may access
- Shows the sources behind each answer
What your team gets
- Answers with links to source documents
- Draft procedures and checklists
- Summaries of fault and quality history
Connect the documents
Agreed manuals, procedures and maintenance records are indexed inside your private environment.
Ask in plain language
An engineer asks, for example, how a previous fault on a particular machine was resolved.
Search what they can access
The assistant searches only the documents that engineer is permitted to see.
Answer with sources
It replies with a summary and references to the reports and manuals it used.
Engineer decides
The engineer checks the sources and applies their own judgement before acting.
Benefits
What it can mean for your organisation
The outcomes we design for. Results depend on your data, people and processes, and are agreed with you rather than assumed.
Less time searching
Engineers spend less time hunting through folders for the right manual or report.
Knowledge that stays
Experience captured in records remains accessible when people move on.
Technical data protected
Drawings and specifications stay in an environment you control.
Consistent documentation
Drafted procedures follow a consistent structure for review and approval.
Capabilities
AI capabilities and recommended models
AI capabilities
- Question answering across technical documents
- Summarising long reports and manuals
- Drafting procedures, checklists and change notes
- Reading scanned documents and older paper records
- Comparing document revisions
Recommended model types
General-purpose language model
Hosted in your environment for answering questions, summarising and drafting.
Embedding model for document search
Finds the passages most relevant to a question across large technical libraries.
Document reading (OCR)
Where needed, converts scanned manuals and paper records into searchable text.
Specific models are chosen during design based on your data, languages, accuracy needs and infrastructure, and explained in plain language.
Integrations
Works alongside your existing systems
Typical systems we plan around. Integrations depend on the systems you use and the access they allow, and are confirmed during design.
- Shared drives and document management systems
- ERP and production systems
- Maintenance management (CMMS) systems
- Quality management systems
- Engineering file stores
- Email and office productivity tools
Security & compliance
Security, privacy and compliance
Security is considered throughout design, deployment and operation, and discussed openly.
In every environment
- Designed so your data is not shared with public AI services
- Access tied to your own users and permissions
- Hosting location agreed with you
- Configuration documented, so it is never a black box
Considerations for Manufacturing & Engineering
- Drawings, specifications and customer designs kept out of public AI services
- Access aligned with existing project and department permissions
- Export-controlled or customer-restricted information identified and handled as agreed
- Quality system requirements, such as ISO 9001 document control, reviewed during design
Compliance stays with you and your advisers
Case studies
Case studies in Manufacturing & Engineering
No published case studies yet
We publish case studies only for completed projects that clients have approved for publication. There are none for Manufacturing & Engineering yet. We are happy to talk through how a project could be scoped.
Discuss a projectRelated solutions
Explore private AI for your engineering teams
Tell us which documents and teams you have in mind, and we will help you find a practical first use case.
