CoLab's Adam Keating on AutoReview, an AI-Powered Drawing Review

CoLab Software, founded in 2017 by mechanical engineers, has just released a new AI-driven drawing review application, dubbed AutoReview. The software "analyzes your 3D models and drawings, then adds markup and comments directly on the design, catching critical issues and helping you move faster with confidence," according to CoLab. 

Adam Keating, CEO and cofounder of CoLab, described his goal is to develop "human-level design review tools to help teams make better technical decisions together, bolted on top of the existing CAD and PLM infrastructure." 

Many major CAD and PLM software vendors offer integrated or standalone CAD file viewers, for example: Dassault
Systemes' SOLIDWORKS eDrawings, Autodesk Viewer, and PTC's Creo View. In addition to supporting the company's proprietary format, they usually include support for widely used 3D format. CoLab's tools have always coexisted with them, often competing with them, Keating pointed out. 

"What we're competing with, is actually the status quo: spreadsheet, PowerPoint, screenshots, and email," Keating observed. What distinguishes CoLab's tools is the automation occurring in the background, he explained. "What we do is incredibly contextual. If you're doing a review in our tool, we let you put a pin right on the geometry. It remembers everything you were doing, and a second later, it's saved. It's self-documenting ... We automatically create the issues for you. We put them in a review history. We give you an audit trail. We do project management in the background. It's built for the enterprise across all CAD and PLM systems," he added. 

The company has worked and tested its tools extensively with PTC, Siemens, and Dassault Systemes products, but not exclusively, according to Keating.

Keating compares AutoReview's AI-trained review system to a layered cake. The foundation layer comes from existing, publicly available LLMs (large language models). "Then we bring our own data sets on top of that -- data from industry experts, from partnerships with standards groups, and what we built in-house for specific processes, like injection-molded design for manufacturing," he explained. "But most customers also want to add their own guidelines, checklists, and standards." AutoReview accommodates it by providing users with a way to further train the program using their own engineering drawings.

AutoReview uses AI to automatically review the drawings and create markup and annotations. Image courtesy of CoLab.

In ongoing R&D initiatives, CoLab will continue to refine the foundation layer and CoLab's in-house data, but customer data is insulated from this process, Keating assured.

Since its launch last week, AutoReview has generated a lot of interest. "Almost 23,000 people are on the wait list," Keating said. CoLab is bringing users on board in phases to ensure its infrastructure has the capacity to support the new users. 

Keating didn't disclose the product's price, but described the offering as "packages with different capabilities on top of the core product, with AI credits and tokens."

For more, listen to our interview with Keating in the podcast.