Frequently Asked Questions

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Automatic Engineer™ is an AI-powered platform for engineering projects that sits above project tools and data. It drives Engineering Intelligence that empowers engineers and organisations to optimise, validate and assure complex projects in real-time. It is powered by Validion™ - a purpose-built validation engine, trained on 25 years of global project delivery data.

Automatic Engineer can be used on any engineering project, in any industry. It's strength lies in large volumes of complex technical data, therefore, the more complex a project the better performance and benefit realised. The following industries represent the high value in adopting Engineering Intelligence.

Infrastructure & Transport
Automatic Engineer continuously verifies engineering compliance across tunnels, railways, highways, airports and utilities, helping project owners and contractors maintain assurance across thousands of requirements, designs, and verification activities.

Data Centres & Digital Infrastructure
The platform validates design compliance, safety requirements, and commissioning evidence for hyperscale data centres, ensuring engineering standards are met across rapidly delivered facilities.

Water & Renewables
Automatic Engineer tracks and validates engineering requirements, testing, and certification for renewable energy projects such as wind farms, solar farms, and transmission infrastructure.

Industrial & Major Capital Projects 

Large industrial facilities such as refineries, processing plants, and manufacturing facilities benefit from continuous engineering validation and real-time project transparency. 

Defence & Highly Regulated Industries
Automatic Engineer provides continuous compliance assurance for highly regulated environments where engineering verification and auditability are critical.

Aerospace & Advanced Manufacturing Similar to the “Digital Thread” used in aerospace, the platform maintains traceability between requirements, engineering models, verification activities, and evidence across complex systems. 

Automatic Engineer is designed for professionals of all levels and functions across an engineering organisation including:

• Engineering firms and consultants
• Infrastructure and construction companies
• Project managers and developers
• Government Organisations and Delivery Authorities
• Technical teams handling complex documentation
• ESG and Sustainability teams at all stages of projects
• Commercial and legal teams supporting engineering projects
• Risk, Opportunity and Value Engineering teams at any stage of projects

In short, it is for anyone who needs to understand, validate, and optimise engineering data with more certainty and visibility.

Key capabilities include:

• AI analysis of engineering documents and drawings
• Design compliance and standards checking
• Risk, opportunity, and value engineering insights
• ESG, safety, and sustainability assessment
• Commercial and contractual intelligence
• Project and document control automation
• Modular dashboards across six engineering domains 

The platform transforms raw technical information and fragmented engineering process into structured, actionable intelligence. The platform promotes team effort across the project teams, and collaboration across the entire organisation.

The platform is intuitive and utiliises agentic AI with the following general process: 

1. Employees select or create a project or program and upload documents to get started.
2. Colleagues and partners are invited to the project and collaborate within domains leveraging agentic AI, custom-built engines and validation technology.
3. Drawing on past projects and Automatic Engineer, project deliverables are developed with less admin and unknowns, and more efficiency and certainty.  

The process is designed to be fast, secure, and scalable.

Automatic Engineer is used across all phases of a project life-cycle. Organisations use the platform to manage all global projects consistently including by procurment phase, team, documents, and deliverables within the platform which sits above, and can be integrated with, specific project tools. The type of use cases within this structure include:

• Engineering design review and value engineering 
• EOI, tender and bid analysis
• Risk and opportunity analysis, identification and implementation
• Compliance with standards and regulations
• ESG, sustainability, carbon and safety reporting
• Commercial and contractual review
• SWOT, win themes, optimisation, cost savings enablers
• Data analysis (past projects) and AI-assisted decision-making

Most AI agents are conversational layers on top of large language models. They generate outputs on what they find, but they do not maintain engineering truth. Automatic Engineer is fundamentally different. It operates as a machine-enforced engineering state engine — maintaining structured project intelligence across time, artefacts, Standards and decisions. The following key differences are outlined.

Design & Purpose

General AI Agents are a one-on-one tool designed to answer a query. Automatic Engineer is an analytical based validation platform that is designed to analyse rather than answer, and a key purpose of the platform is to put people at the heart of the organisation, supported by an intelligence framework that empowers teams and the organisation as a body of people, rather than one-on-one solo work that can result from general AI agents.

Architecture & Operation

AI Agents are prompt-driven and probabilistic. They operate statelessly unless explicitly orchestrated. They have been trained for broad application with a 'force the best answer' directive that can work quite well in general use cases but not for engineering. Automatic Engineer is rule-based and deterministic at state layer, meaning it structures engineering artefacts into a dependency graph, maintains constraint consistency, and performs bounded propagation within pre-determined domains. Without this architecture, an agent can be a liability to an organisation. 

Automatic Engineer is not a document management system, it is an engineering platform with validation at its core. Automatic Engineer can connect to SharePoint and other DMS and will read and validate documents as a controlled step before that data is relied upon. Some organisations that connect an internal GPT to their SharePoint miss this critical step. 

Automatic Engineer employs a systematic approach to validating data through Validion - its validation engine specifically designed for engineering application ecosystems and block-chain inspired date stamping protocols.

ProjectWise is primarily an advanced CDE (Common Data Environment) and design collaboration system. Automatic Engineer sits above the CDE and manages engineering consistency by ingesting artefacts from CDEs and then applying:

• Cross-domain compliance reconciliation
• Machine-enforced validated state maintenance
• Dependency-based constraint analysis 

Automatic Engineer is also fundamentally different in its system architecture which is designed for organisational access (rather than closed project only access) and institutional global learning continuity (rather than isolate and archive organisational project knowledge under a start-stop-start again framework).

Aconex digitised document and communication flow in construction. Automatic Engineer has digitised engineering decision logic. Therefore, complementing each other - Aconex provides much needed administrative certainty, while Automatic Engineer provides much needed technical certainty.

AE is designed to support all stages of all projects and programs including Alliances, D&C, DBOM, PPP, Construct Only, EPC, Technical Advisor, and Delivery Partner models. See Partner for more information.

 Yes. Request a demonstration of Automatic Engineer to experience engineering intelligence firsthand.