Authentise today announced new and very interesting features for their Threads system.
Over the past few years they’ve built up an impressive collection of services that allow companies to manage design projects from concept to production. They handle RFQs, Design, Material Management, Digital Parts Warehousing, and can even dispatch jobs directly to 3D printing equipment.
One of their key features is a service they call “Threads” (Not to be confused with the social media platform). Threads is a collaboration tools that sits alongside their other services, and allows participants to provide comments and responses for all aspects of a project.
The idea is to reduce the number of meetings required, and instead channel discussions to a much more real-time conversational mode.
Threads has been available for a while, and from the sounds of things it’s been well received by participants.
The news today is that Authentise has added new AI (LLM) features to Threads, and it’s quite interesting what they’ve done.
The specific new features are:
- Natively annotate 3D models and tie those comments back to broader conversations related to the project.
- Use AI-generated suggestions to capture milestones related to your conversations.
- Tie your team together into a synchronous conversation about a 3D model, always able to see each colleague’s point of view.
- Summarise each Thread with AI to make it easier for your colleagues to understand the context of each conversation.
- Investigate the content of your threads using the AI-powered Threads.
The ability to annotate 3D models is critical, as that gets to the heart of the design issues that may arise during the process. Being able to point at specific regions in a model will be extremely helpful, and reduce the length of conversations.
But the more important aspect is the integration of AI features, which we understand are based on the company’s previous AI feature, 3DGPT. It’s a system that’s been trained on 3D printing and is therefore able to answer many questions about a project’s design. It can, for example, suggest materials for a project.
The new AI features go well beyond this. Basically Authentise has enabled their new AI to examine the content associated with a project. This means that the user is able to ask questions about the project, in much the same way that an AI tool can answer questions about an uploaded PDF, for example.
What would you ask it?
The examples shown by Authentise include an ability to automatically figure out what milestones should exist on a project. Another very intriguing example is “what’s causing the project to slow down?” The AI would examine the chatter on a project and try to determine where the holdup is located.
This may seem like a straightforward feature, but my suspicion is that it will unlock all kinds of project management improvements as users discover new ways to use the AI. Imagine just being able to instantly find a previous comment or idea that was made weeks ago instead of laboriously scrolling through conversations.
This will be amplified when used over larger projects involving multiple parties, especially in different companies. One can easily imagine the friction to progress that happens when multiple corporate bureaucracies collide. The new Threads AI system just might be able to cut through a lot of that.
Via Authentise
