5 minute read

Transforming Aerospace Operations with Generative AI

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Yurts summary

Aerospace companies are at the forefront of technological innovation, constantly seeking ways to improve efficiency, streamline operations, and maintain their competitive edge. With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, many are beginning to explore how Generative AI (GenAI) can be leveraged to solve some of the most persistent challenges they face—including core operational inefficiencies that impact everything from day-to-day decision-making to long-term strategic initiatives.

Generative AI in Aerospace

GenAI has the potential to revolutionize the aerospace industry by offering solutions to problems that have long plagued the sector. As the aerospace workforce continues to evolve and the volume of data generated by complex systems and technical processes increases, there’s a growing need for tools that can help companies manage, analyze, and utilize this information more effectively.

However, the adoption of generative AI in aerospace comes with unique challenges. The sensitive nature of aerospace data, along with the life-or-death implications of many engineering decisions, means that any AI solution must not only be powerful, but also reliable, secure, and highly customizable to the needs of the industry. As companies evaluate how to integrate GenAI into their workflows, they must carefully consider how it can meet these stringent demands while addressing their key pain points.

The Challenges

Three of the most significant challenges currently facing the aerospace industry—knowledge loss due to employee turnover or information silos, fragmented information across disparate systems, and the difficulty of navigating lengthy technical documentation—are ripe for AI-driven solutions. Addressing these issues with GenAI can provide aerospace companies with a transformative tool that enhances operational efficiency, improves safety, and supports better decision-making.

Knowledge Loss

Knowledge loss can occur because information is often held either by a single individual or team. For example, an engineer may encounter an unusual problem and work to find a solution. Once they do so, that knowledge is likely to remain solely with them. Such silos only compound when tenured experienced employees leave and take years—sometimes decades—of institutional knowledge with them, creating critical gaps in expertise and operational continuity.

Fragmented Information Across Disparate Systems

Similarly, fragmented information across systems poses a major challenge. Aerospace companies typically rely on a variety of complex, and often outdated, systems that don’t easily integrate or communicate. These systems can be cumbersome to use, lacking intuitive interfaces and effective search functionalities, further complicating access to crucial information.

Difficulty of Navigating Lengthy Technical Documentation

Even when the right data is identified, navigating extensive technical documentation can be another obstacle. Manuals and technical reports often span hundreds of pages, making it difficult to locate specific details quickly. Engineers may know which document contains the information they need, but pinpointing that data can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.

The Solutions

Yurts Enterprise AI addresses each of these challenges with a comprehensive AI-driven solution:

  • Driving information sharing: When an individual or team documents new findings or a troubleshooting solution, this documentation will become automatically discoverable for any employee with appropriate permissions. 
  • Preserving knowledge: Yurts ensures that critical knowledge remains accessible, even after employees leave, by capturing and organizing information so it’s always available to the team. 
  • Unified data access: Yurts consolidates disparate data sources such as MES, ERP, and CMMS systems into a single, intuitive interface, allowing engineers to search across all systems and find documents easily, even if they don’t know which system houses the information. 
  • Streamlined information retrieval: Yurts enables users to search within documents, ask questions about content, and even generate new insights based on existing data. This dramatically improves the efficiency of navigating technical documents, ensuring that valuable information is always at hand when it’s needed.

Secure and Trustworthy

While these capabilities are transformative, they are just the foundation for success in the aerospace sector. Aerospace companies also face unique concerns related to data privacy and security. Much of their data is sensitive and compartmentalized, and must be kept secure. Yurts addresses these needs by offering options such as hosting data within the company’s own cloud or deploying large language models (LLMs) on-premise, ensuring that sensitive information never leaves the organization’s control. Built-in permissions and guardrails further ensure that data remains appropriately secure and accessible only to authorized users.

Additionally, accuracy and verification are non-negotiable in aerospace, where engineers' decisions directly impact safety and operations. Trusting AI solutions blindly is not an option. Yurts is not only the most accurate solution on the market, but it also offers full transparency, providing inline citations, previews of the source text, and links back to original documents for every AI-generated response. This gives engineers the ability to not just trust—but verify—all of their answers.

Moving Forward

Some aerospace companies are exploring the development of their own GenAI solutions using open-source tools or existing software. Many have built prototypes that they’ve begun to demonstrate both internally and externally. The key decision they now face is how much responsibility they want to take on for building and maintaining these systems at the enterprise-wide level.

While setting up a basic GenAI-powered chat experience using an LLM and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) might be straightforward, creating and maintaining a solution that is highly accurate, trustworthy, secure, fully integrated across systems (Sharepoint, Teams, etc..), efficient, and flexible is far more complex and resource intensive. We haven’t even talked about the compute costs, which Yurts helps companies control with its built in MLOps platform and use of smaller models.

The Yurts platform enables teams to easily deploy and manage GenAI technology while embedding it into existing enterprise workflows and applications. This turnkey solution minimizes the need for development teams to get involved in the nuts and bolts, allowing companies to quickly bring AI-powered capabilities to life. For those who want to customize or extend the platform, Yurts also offers a wide range of APIs and configurable options.

Thinking about introducing GenAI at your aerospace company? Get in touch! 

Frequently asked questions

What are the applications of generative AI in aerospace operations?
Generative AI can be applied in numerous ways, including optimizing workflows, preserving knowledge, unifying data access across systems, and improving the efficiency of navigating technical documentation.
How can generative AI improve efficiency in day-to-day aerospace operations?
Generative AI can significantly enhance day-to-day operations by automating information retrieval, eliminating knowledge silos, and making critical data easily accessible.
How does Generative AI address knowledge management in aerospace?
Generative AI addresses knowledge management by automating the documentation process, making information easily discoverable, and preserving valuable knowledge even after employees leave the organization.
How can generative AI improve navigation of technical documentation in aerospace?
Generative AI can enhance navigation by enabling users to search within documents, ask questions about content, and generate new insights, thus reducing the time and effort required to locate specific information.
How can generative AI solve the issue of information silos in aerospace?
Generative AI can solve this issue by consolidating disparate data sources into a unified interface, making information from all systems easily searchable and accessible.
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written by
Maddie Wolf
Head of Operations
5 minute read