AI is not the promise. It is the means.

"Can you build me an AI agent?"

It is the question I get the most since AI became the topic of every meeting. And I almost always answer with another one: what problem are you actually trying to solve?

It is not a dodge. It is the only honest way to start.

What people are really asking for

When someone asks me for "something with AI", they are really telling me something else: I lose hours on repetitive tasks. I make expensive mistakes. My team clicks through work a machine could do. My engineering data lives in a system nobody knows how to exploit.

That is the real job: finding the problem underneath the request. Sometimes AI is the answer. And sometimes the answer is a solid Excel file, a 50-line iLogic rule, or classic automation without a single line of LLM.

When AI is the right tool

I built VaultPilot, together with Avant Leap, because the problem called for it: operating Autodesk Vault Professional by conversation, with an agent that audits 217 components in seconds, a job that used to take around 20 minutes by hand. There, natural language adds real value: the user's request is ambiguous, context matters, and the operations are many and varied.

But that same agent does not trust the model: it runs with dry-run, validation against the real Vault schema and a full audit trail before writing anything. AI is the means. Reliability is the requirement.

When the answer is saying no

I have also solved cases where adding AI would have been expensive, slow and fragile. Problems that were 100% rules, where an LLM only added cost, latency and error probability. There, I said no, and delivered something simpler that worked better.

That is, for me, the acid test for any "AI for engineering" consultant: ask them when they last recommended NOT using AI. Whoever never does is not solving your problem. They are selling you theirs.

Solving problems, inside your Autodesk products

My job is not to sell you AI. It is to solve your problem with the right tool, inside the products you already use: Inventor, Vault, AutoCAD, Forma. Fewer clicks, fewer errors, fewer wasted hours.