Aerospace Knowledge Assistant
In aerospace, an answer without a source is not an answer. Get both — in seconds.
Aerospace engineering has a knowledge problem with a compliance twist. Like every manufacturer, your engineers lose hours searching program documentation, process specs, design reviews and test reports scattered across Teamcenter, shares and archives. Unlike every manufacturer, you cannot solve it with a generic chatbot — because in an AS9100 world, “the AI said so” is worth exactly nothing. Every statement that touches a design decision needs a document behind it.
That constraint is not an obstacle to AI. It is the specification for the right kind: retrieval-based assistants that answer only from your controlled documents and attach the evidence to every claim. Large engine manufacturers already run this in production — one German engine maker reports 90–95 percent retrieval accuracy over a 15,000-document corpus; GE Aerospace rolled out generative AI company-wide.
We build the same capability for aerospace suppliers and NewSpace teams — on your infrastructure, connected to Teamcenter, tuned on your document types, with the audit trail built in from the first answer.
// Knowledge under audit conditions, in numbers
The double burden: find the knowledge, then prove where it came from
Ask a design engineer at an aerospace supplier what a “quick question” costs. The material allowable for that titanium forging is in a 28-page report from 2016. The approved repair concept for a known erosion issue lives in a design review that only the program lead can locate. The customer’s surface-treatment requirement changed two revisions ago, and the printout circulating in the shop is the old one.
Each of these searches ends the same way twice: first you find the answer, then you re-find it when someone — a customer, an auditor, an investigator — asks you to prove it. AS9100 and EASA Part 21 make the second search mandatory. That is why aerospace suppliers cannot use the shortcut everyone else uses: a public chatbot that answers fluently and cites nothing is not a productivity tool here, it is a nonconformity generator.
The assistant we build inverts that trade-off. It is less fluent than a consumer chatbot and more useful: it answers only from your controlled documents, shows the evidence chain for every claim, and says “not found in the connected sources” when that is the truth. The compliance constraint becomes the product.
// Live view — assistant on the supplier's controlled documents
Every answer is an evidence chain — not a paragraph of prose
The difference between a consumer chatbot and an audit-trail assistant is what stands behind a sentence. When the assistant states a limit, an approval or a test result, that statement is assembled from retrieved passages in controlled documents — and the chain from requirement to evidence is displayed, clickable, in the answer itself:
What must hold
Customer spec §4.3 · rev DThe controlled requirement, at its current revision — with the revision history one click away.
What was decided
DR-2023-41 · releasedThe design review or MRB decision that interpreted the requirement for your part.
What was calculated
JR-2023-118 · §6.2The justification or stress report backing the decision — the exact section, not just the file.
What was proven
TB-2023-swing-07Test series, FAI results, inspection records — the physical proof, attached as datasets.
This chain is what an auditor asks for — and what your engineers reconstruct by hand today. The assistant assembles it in seconds because the links already exist in your Teamcenter structures and document references; it just follows them faster than a human can.
Four jobs the assistant does from day one
Aerospace suppliers don’t need a toy — they need relief in the four situations where document search burns the most engineering time:
Program knowledge on demand
Material allowables, repair concepts, known issues, "why did we design it this way in 2016" — answered from reports and reviews across program history, with the document cited. Decades of program memory stop depending on who is still employed.
Specs & revisions, resolved
Customer specs, process specs, works instructions — the assistant answers from the current revision, flags where internal documents lag behind customer changes, and links the delta. The outdated-printout problem dies quietly.
Audit & customer-question prep
Evidence chains that took days to reconstruct — requirement, decision, analysis, test — assemble in seconds. Audit preparation shifts from archaeology to review, and customer queries get answered while trust is still warm.
Onboarding without burning seniors
New engineers ask the assistant the hundred small questions about your programs, conventions and NX/Teamcenter setup — instead of interrupting the two people who carry the department. Aerospace's long learning curve gets measurably shorter.
When does the assistant pay off?
The value scales with document volume, program lifetime and audit pressure. You are a candidate if most of these apply:
- You supply into AS9100 / EASA Part 21 programs — traceability is a contractual obligation, not a preference.
- Program documentation spans decades and thousands of documents — findable only by the engineers who wrote them.
- Customer specs and process specs change revisions faster than your internal documents follow.
- Audit and customer-query preparation regularly costs days of evidence hunting.
- Experienced program engineers retire within the next five years — and NewSpace competitors iterate without your legacy burden.
- Public AI tools are blocked — export control and customer NDAs rule out any cloud chatbot.
What the assistant connects to
Built for the document landscape of an aerospace supplier — with access control designed in, not bolted on.
Before and after: the customer query that used to ruin a week
A customer’s quality department asks you to substantiate a design claim on a part delivered four years ago. Here is what that request costs on each side of the change:
Before — archaeology
- Identify who worked the program back then — ½ day
- Dig through Teamcenter, shares and mail archives — 2–3 days
- Reconstruct the evidence chain, hope nothing is missing — 1 day
- Two engineers pulled off program work for a week
- Customer waits — and remembers the waiting
After — assembled evidence
- Ask the assistant in plain language — seconds
- Evidence chain assembled with released revisions — minutes
- Engineer verifies each link before anything leaves the house — ½ day
- Gaps in the chain surface immediately — fixable before the auditor finds them
- Customer gets a substantiated answer inside the week
Why inteliScience
Any AI consultancy can stand up a document chatbot. The aerospace version fails or succeeds on three details: whether the assistant reads Teamcenter structures — items, revisions, released status, datasets — instead of just crawling files; whether access control mirrors your export-control markings and customer NDAs per user, at question time; and whether the answers are engineered for verification, because in your world an unverifiable answer is a liability, not a convenience.
Those details are our home ground. We build on the Siemens stack daily — Teamcenter customization through supported interfaces, NX-side integration where your designers work — and we tune the assistant on aerospace document types: justification reports, process specs, FAI records, MRB decisions. Where Siemens’ Teamcenter Copilot offers useful building blocks, we build on them; where your compliance reality demands more, we build the layer it doesn’t have.
And the honest boundary stays visible: the assistant finds and assembles — your engineers verify and sign. The audit trail belongs to your documents; the AI just stops you from excavating it by hand.
Fixed price — no day rates, no surprises
Aerospace Assistant Pilot
- 2–3 document sources connected (e.g. one program's documentation, process specs, QM instructions)
- Deployed on your infrastructure — on-prem or EU cloud, export-control compliant
- Evaluation on 100 real questions from your engineers — including audit-style evidence queries
- Measured answer-quality and grounding report, reviewed with your team
- Rollout blueprint: sources, permissions, Teamcenter/NX integration, costs
6–8 weeks · your documents never leave your control · pilot results are yours, whatever you decide afterwards.
For comparison
The cost of archaeology
- Engineers spending a quarter of their day searching controlled documents
- Days of evidence hunting per audit and customer query
- And the un-priced risk: program memory retiring, one engineer at a time
Frequently asked questions
Is an AI answer acceptable in an AS9100 audit?
How is export control handled? Not every engineer may see every document.
What stops it from inventing answers?
Isn't this what Siemens' Teamcenter Copilot does?
Our documentation is partly scanned paper from the 90s. Does that work?
Can we start with one program instead of the whole company?
Your next audit question has an answer in your archive. The assistant finds it before the auditor asks.
Bring us the ten document questions that cost your engineers the most time — we'll show you the assistant answering them from your own controlled documents, evidence attached.
Talk to a Knowledge AI EngineerAlways here to support you – reach out to us with your questions, and we’ll guide you every step of the way.
+40 774 463 429
+40 774 463 429
Romania
info@inteliscience.net
info@inteliscience.net
