Authentise Launches Generative AI Extension ThreadsDoc to Automate Document Creation

Manufacturing workflow software provider Authentise has announced its latest releases ahead of next week’s Formnext 2024 in Frankfurt. Building on its generative AI exploration, the startup is launching ThreadsDoc, a GenAI extension to its popular Threads engineering collaboration platform that was introduced in 2023. This new extension uses rich data from engineering collaborations to automate, and thus speed up, the creation of templated documents, like Technical Data Packages.

“The launch of ThreadsDoc represents a significant step forward in accelerating engineering workflows. By automating the generation of reports from the data already present in engineering discussions and files, we are helping organizations unlock time savings and reduce friction. This is the way to get engineers focused on the most creative tasks and provide all future stakeholders with an easy way to access the work done,” said Authentise CEO Andre Wegner. “In the future, every product won’t only include designs, but automated reports that describe the thinking and intent behind the designs.”

At last year’s Formnext, I spoke to Wegner about Threads, which digitizes, automates, and tracks industrial engineering and manufacturing operations. He said the tool was a “much more natural” way to develop a design plan. ThreadsDoc was built on this tool’s platform, and integrates all of the content that’s generated by engineering teams. Everything from casual chats and conversations to uploaded documentation and 3D model annotations is added. This creates a draft document, which saves users a lot of time because now they don’t have to do the manual work of creating the technical documents for a project. ThreadsDoc seamlessly does it for them, summarizing all of the team’s results in one place.

“A lot of energy (100’s of hours) goes into just summarizing the results. GenAI can save that, as it can with many other standardized reports and documents. Hence the expanded scope of ThreadsDoc,” Wegner told us in an email. “Threads is an especially good platform for this because it captures all the collaborative data that’s generated in the process of coming up with results – the chat, annotations, attached documents, and so forth.”

A main feature of ThreadsDoc is its built-in intelligence. The tool will look at a draft document and evaluate how complete it is, finding parts where the content is weak, or there’s not enough of it. Then, it will automatically suggest creating other Threads to bring more collaborators and experts onboard to fill in the gaps. This helps teams generate a new draft document from the newly added input, resulting in stronger documents overall.

Authentise developed ThreadsDoc with the support of Boeing, which used the tool for a very important purpose: reducing the amount of time it takes to release a Technical Data Package (TDP). To help clear a backlog of 100+ parts, Boeing used ThreadsDoc to decrease the time to generate a TDP by up to 150 hours per project. As they say, time is money!

In addition to TDPs, ThreadsDoc also supports draft document creation for several other use cases, like Risk Assessments, as it can automatically compile new inputs from different teams to efficiently generate detailed risk analysis reports. Another application is helping companies create structured Onboarding Briefings that use the latest information that’s shared in engineering teams. Finally, ThreadsDoc can seamlessly combine project timelines, outcomes, and updates from different collaborators into comprehensive Milestone and Project Reports.

Authentise has also released the API for Threads, making the “collaborative data foundation of ThreadsDoc” available to developers so they can create custom plugins and expand upon the beneficial integration with Plyable through a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) solution. This is exciting, because a large user group of Threads is students, who are busily building their own mini add-ons to Threads for assistance in design assessment and engineering documentation. Of course, enterprises and other innovators are also using ThreadsAPI to develop custom add-ons in order to optimize their workflows.

ThreadsDoc is yet another positive addition to Authentise’s portfolio of data-driven tools to help engineers and manufacturers speed up their time-to-market. You can learn more about ThreadsDocs and ThreadsAPI by visiting Authentise at Formnext, Booth A39, Hall 11.0.