There’s a massive gap in how engineering leaders think about the future of AI and what they’re actually doing about it.
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100% of surveyed engineering leaders say it’s of importance that their entire team fully adopts AI in the next 1-2 years. 95% say it’s so important that failing to fully adopt AI will either: put them out of business (47%) or cause them to miss company performance goals (48%). This speaks to the existential fear present in engineering leadership. Full AI adoption is not a matter of “if” but “when.” And that “when” better be much sooner than 24 months from now.
Most engineering leaders believe AI will outperform a human checker in ~6-24 months for tasks like: design standards and guidelines review, DFM review and 3D model review for components. This is an underestimation. This is likely when many AI tools for these tasks will explode in the market, but AI is already making rapid progress on these reviews and many others. Sophisticated tools, like AutoReview, promise many of these reviews today and will quickly evolve in the next few months.
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Despite AI’s rapid progress, engineering leaders face a bigger obstacle than AI capabilities or ROI: internal red tape. Challenges like data hygiene, change management, and integration complexity outweigh cost concerns or lack of business case. These barriers are less about whether AI can deliver value and more about whether organizations can move fast enough to adopt it. For leaders, this poses a serious risk: while leadership debates process, competitors adopting AI outpace them at an exponential rate.
Nearly all engineering leaders agree: there’s an issue getting suppliers the information they need to give adequate design feedback
However, PLM access doesn’t seem to be the answer.
83% of engineering leaders agree that suppliers should not have their own PLM licenses.
This means that what engineering teams need is not suppliers to have PLM access, but instead a platform for bringing suppliers into select product data. Preferably one that sync back to the company’s PLM.
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