Authentise AI tool slashes aerospace documentation costs

Documentation overhead remains a major hurdle in bringing additive manufactured parts to production within the aerospace and defense sectors. Authentise, a digital workflow management company, has developed an AI-assisted documentation tool that Boeing estimates will save approximately $8 million in engineering costs during its first year of implementation.

Simon McCaldin, Open Innovation Lead at Authentise, explained the system's functionality at the AMA: Aerospace Space and Defence 2025 event. Authentise's software portfolio, built around capturing and utilizing the digital thread in manufacturing, includes engineering collaboration, production workflow management, and parts cataloguing.

The process of preparing a part for production typically involves converting unstructured engineering information, such as CAD files and design rationale, into technical documentation for various stakeholders. McCaldin noted this can take between 120 to 150 hours per part for even relatively simple assemblies.

Authentise's Threads platform, designed for R&D activities using agile methodologies, combines messaging, project management, document repositories, and 3D model annotation in a permissioned workspace. The first AI layer, a large language model, analyzes engineer communications, suggesting how to log information and flagging potential decisions or action items. This creates consistently structured engineering discussions.

ThreadsBot builds upon this structured data, enabling users to query the workspace and obtain synthesized summaries of project status, outstanding issues, and past decisions. In one Department of Defense contract involving 50 engineers from six organizations, ThreadsBot identified three significant project risks that a formal model-based systems engineering approach had missed. The tool also aids in onboarding new stakeholders by allowing them to directly query the workspace.

ThreadsDoc automates the generation of technical data packages (TDPs) from information within the Threads environment. Users select relevant data sources and provide prompts for document sections, and the system assembles a draft report. Authentise tested this with Boeing, which was addressing a backlog of TDPs for cast and 3D printed parts. Boeing anticipates significant savings by offloading the time-consuming retrieval and assembly of documentation to the tool, allowing engineers to focus on review and verification.