Will an AI agent understand our tolerances and specs?

No, and anyone telling you otherwise is the one to worry about. A drawing carries tolerances, surface finishes and geometric details that decide whether a part is right or wrong, and reading them is engineering judgement. What an agent should do is narrower: capture the enquiry, check it is complete, flag what is missing, and hand your estimator a full brief. It never sets a tolerance, never invents a spec, and never quotes.

That boundary is the whole answer, and it is worth being blunt about because it is the objection we hear first, and it is a fair one.

Why the fear is reasonable

Your business runs on traceability. A wrong number does not cause a bad customer experience, it scraps a batch, fails an inspection, or ships a part that should never have left. In that world, software that is confidently wrong is worse than software that does nothing.

Anyone who has tried a general AI tool has seen the problem: it sounds authoritative, gets some things right, and gets others wrong in ways you would only catch if you already knew the answer. That is a completely rational reason to keep it away from anything technical.

So we keep it away from anything technical.

The actual line

What the agent does on an enquiry:

• Takes the details a good office would take: part, material, quantity, tolerance called out by the customer, finish, standard, delivery date.
• Checks the enquiry is complete enough to quote, and asks for whatever is missing.
• Recognises an existing customer and pulls up their history.
• Answers factual questions from what you have given it: your machine list, the materials you work, your accreditations, your typical lead times and batch ranges.
• Says when it is checking something, checks, and comes back with the real answer.

What it never does:

• Read a drawing and decide a tolerance is achievable.
• Choose a process, a fixture or a workholding strategy.
• Price the job or commit a date it has not verified.
• Guess. When it does not know, it says so and passes to a person.

The difference matters: recording a tolerance the customer stated is admin, judging whether you can hold it is engineering. The first we will take off your desk. The second stays with your estimator.

"Grounded" is a specific claim, not a vibe

When we say the agent answers from your own information, we mean it only has what you have given it: your capability list, materials, accreditations, lead times, the documents you upload. It is not answering from the internet and it is not reasoning about your parts.

The practical test for any supplier is to ask three things:

1. Where does the answer come from? If the answer is "the model knows", walk away. It should be your documents.
2. What happens when it is unsure? The only acceptable answer is that it says so and escalates to a human.
3. Can we see every conversation and switch it off? If not, you do not have control, you have a black box.

What that means for you day to day

Your estimator's job does not change. What changes is what lands on their desk: a complete enquiry with the material, quantity, finish and delivery already captured, on the day it came in, instead of a half-finished email they have to chase.

The engineering judgement stays with the engineers. The chasing stops being their problem.