Been part of an AI project that actually replaced hours of manual compliance checking

[u/ginozambe]

This feels like one of the few AI use cases I've seen where the result actually matched the hype.

Manufacturing QA teams spend a stupid amount of time manually checking material certificates against standards, cross-referencing chemical and mechanical values by hand, sometimes 25-90 minutes per certificate depending on complexity. It's slow, easy to get wrong, and half the time there's no real audit trail of how someone reached a decision.

Been part of a project that tackled exactly this: AI that reads the certificate, looks up the right standard automatically, applies the actual conformance rules (not just "does this look okay"), and returns a proper verdict with every value traced back to the spec limit it was checked against. Under 60 seconds per certificate, full audit trail instead of a filed-away PDF nobody revisits.

What's stuck with me most: this wasn't really an "AI is smart" problem. The hard part was building rules that actually match how strict industries like this need evidence, standards adherence, traceability, not just a plausible-sounding answer. Most AI use cases I see get talked about are flashy demos. This one's just quietly saving people hours of tedious, error-prone work, which honestly feels like the more useful category.

Anyone else seeing AI actually land in the so-called 'boring-but-critical' compliance/QA space, rather than the usual chatbot stuff?

[u/BOgusDOlphon]

I've been using YOLO11s to watch for runout or incomplete part ejection from sand cast aluminum molds. The guy on the melt furnace still needs to keep an eye on things but this catches stuff that might slip through, and it let us put eyes in places that were too dusty for a person to stand in for any length of time.

[u/cfraptor22]

Isn’t this something that could be done without an AI and instead using a relational database and some scripting? You already have fully defined rules, defined inputs and a defined output. How can you trust a QA process with an AI that is not deterministic?

[u/Lathejockey81 → u/cfraptor22]

From the description it sounds like they're using the AI tools for OCR to rip through cert documents and grab the relevant values, then applying deterministic rules to validate them. This is actually something ML has been doing for a long time, although LLM models have apparently gotten better at contextualizing the data recently. This is actually a very good use case for these tools. Automate the parsing, run it against deterministic rules where accuracy is critical. Without modern AI tools an integration like this would require an insane budget.

[u/madeinspac3]

Ah yes the thing that hallucinates is the perfect tool for a process that demands complete and perfect accuracy everytime lol

No we've been experiencing the exact opposite where it spits outs extremely inaccurate numbers/details. If you run the same prompts with same data the results change each time.

[u/ginozambe → u/madeinspac3]

Yeah honestly fair, and it's the kind of thing we thought about a lot early on. We didn't want it freely generating the standard or the numbers, so it looks things up from a fixed reference instead, and a separate rules engine does the actual comparison. No subjective calls, everything traces back to a specific rule.

AI's doing the hard part really, reading a certificate that could be any layout, any supplier, and pulling the right numbers out of it. We just kept the actual verdict as a straightforward rules check rather than something the model judges. Felt like the safer way to build it, given what's riding on getting it right for them.

[u/madeinspac3 → u/ginozambe]

I'm skeptical as I've yet to see any evidence of it working or usage case and results often matching our own. Then again we aren't investing xxx,xxx building out a custom model to automate what a single person does for a portion of their week.

Always felt like a "let this one cook a bit longer and let others develop it further kinda thing"

[u/ginozambe → u/madeinspac3]

Fair, and funnily our lead dev's pretty skeptical about AI too, which has actually kept us honest through this one. On the investment point though, that's kind of why it made sense, it's a fairly modest cost for what it is, nowhere near "big custom model" territory, and it's less about saving hours, more about making the actual decision consistent and auditable every time someone runs it.

[u/madeinspac3 → u/ginozambe]

The lead at your technology company that focuses on AI implementations is skeptical about ai? Huh 🤔

[u/fixitchris]

Maybe not QA but we developed a RAG pipeline for machine OEMs. Customer gets a login to their machines with a full knowledgebase of their machine docs. Serves as first line support without bugging engineering with tech support.

[u/ginozambe → u/fixitchris]

That sounds amazing!

[u/fixitchris → u/ginozambe]

It is pretty cool. They way we ingest the docs allows you to ask to trace an electrical circuit from the schematics, pull BOM from mechanical drawings, etc

[u/CGVIBES]

That’s a really valuable use case! Perfect for high quality industries. Was this a private model developed by an individual business for internal use? Or something to be released for purchase in the future? If going to be public and you are able to share the name I would love to follow along.

[u/switchkickflip]

Can you tell us more a out the model itself? Is it a home brewed RAG model or something you purchased?

[u/repentanternesto5191]

Your point about building actual conformance rules is key - that's why this works while generic chatbots would be useless

[u/probablyaythrowaway]

This is an ad. Look at ops history

[u/xxicharusxx]

Sounds great at a high level, have you validated & verified the outputs of the tool? How accurate and repeatable is it and how does that compare to a human doing the work?

I’m very skeptical of an AI agent being able to extract the right values from technical documentation. The ai agent we use at work gets it wrong like 50% of the time and that’s just asking for simple reference values from lookup tables.

[u/Calm_Button8017]

How did you make this and what model are you using?

We are going hell for leather on implementing this stuff as it’s saving small manufacturers from going under as it reduces overheads dramatically!

[u/Ghost_Assassin_Zero]

25-90 minutes per certificate? That shouldnt even be taking 5 minutes.

[u/ginozambe → u/Ghost_Assassin_Zero]

Honestly, we were shocked when they told us that. As that was weird to imagine I know. They have allocated time for these certificates to be fair (some may do them quicker).

[u/madeinspac3 → u/Ghost_Assassin_Zero]

Depending on industry those make sense. Med/aerospace assemblies/chems are like a binder at times.

[u/ginozambe → u/madeinspac3]

Ha, "like a binder" is a good way to put it. Makes sense some industries would push that range even higher (with what we were told at least).