The aerospace & defense (A&D) sector is known for its complexity. From managing highly technical manufacturing processes to navigating strict regulatory requirements, A&D manufacturers are walking a tightrope between precision and productivity. With the rise of generative AI, many are eager to explore the opportunities. But adopting AI just for the sake of it won’t deliver real results or a return on your investment. The real opportunity lies in leveraging AI to address significant business challenges.
Technology Isn’t the Hard Part—Transformation Is
When modernizing operations, most manufacturers find the toughest challenge isn’t adopting new technology—it’s everything else. Culture, regulation, and habits are much harder to change than software. As George Westerman of MIT once said, “Technology changes quickly. Organizations change much more slowly.”
AI also won’t succeed without buy-in from both leadership and users, alignment with compliance standards, and seamless integration into daily workflows. For A&D manufacturers, transformation isn’t just about implementing a new solution. It’s about building a connection between innovation and execution that will help you solve real business challenges. In A&D, this might mean aligning AI solutions with strict audit trails and change-control processes that have been unchanged for decades.
Key Challenges for A&D Manufacturers
A&D manufacturers encounter numerous challenges daily, but three, in particular, are common across the industry as a whole and are driving the need for more innovative solutions:
- The skilled workforce is retiring. Longtime employees often possess decades of institutional knowledge. As they exit the workforce, so does their expertise, leading to costly delays, errors, inefficiencies, quality escapes, and compliance risks.
- Manual processes and siloed systems continue to persist. Many A&D manufacturers continue to rely heavily on spreadsheets, paper documentation, and disconnected systems to complete work and track compliance. The answers to a question or the steps to solve a problem are often buried in a pile of pages or separate systems that can take someone days to search through. This can slow down responses during regulatory audits or customer inspections.
- Scaling processes is slow. With increased demand, A&D manufacturing is often distributed across various teams and locations, resulting in inconsistencies throughout the organization. Without established standard practices and processes in place, compliance, quality, and safety issues can arise, resulting in downtime, rework, and even serious injuries.
How AI Can Tackle These Problems
AI is a tool to empower your teams, not replace them. Think of it as a business copilot that enhances human expertise, ensures consistency, and provides real-time decision support when and where it’s needed most.
For example, to help address the challenges discussed above, AI can:
- Document institutional knowledge from retiring workers to preserve and improve knowledge transfer.
- Provide step-by-step instructions for complex procedures, reducing delays and human errors.
- Access relevant data from isolated systems instantly, eliminating lengthy searches and freeing up time for highly skilled technicians to focus their efforts on critical tasks that require their hands-on expertise.
- Offer real-time suggestions based on patterns, anomalies, or changing standards.
- Create consistent and easy-to-access process documentation to support the scaling of manufacturing processes.
Instead of viewing AI as a replacement for skilled labor, forward-thinking manufacturers are treating it as a partner that enhances their teams’ intelligence, speed, and resilience.
From General AI to Domain-Specific Intelligence
It’s tempting to assume that popular generative AI tools, like large language models (LLMs), can be integrated into any environment and provide immediate value. However, A&D is not like other industries, and generic AI is not built to handle its complexities, compliance, and traceability requirements. It may make suggestions that are not appropriate for the A&D industry or struggle to navigate multi-layered data environments. For instance, a generic AI chatbot might answer a question about a torque specification with outdated or incomplete context, risking rework or safety issues.
That’s why domain-specific AI, like Solumina AI, is gaining traction. It understands the intricacies of the industry, allowing it to provide actionable data and solutions. By training Solumina AI in the unique language, requirements, and workflows of your specific A&D manufacturing organization, it can ensure more accurate outputs, audit-ready documentation, and dependable decision-making support.
Allow the Business to Guide the AI
The companies that will lead the future of A&D manufacturing aren’t those chasing the latest tech. They’re the ones using it to solve real-world problems. Before investing in AI, A&D leaders should consider: What outcomes do we need to achieve? What is holding us back? How can AI help us make progress—safely, efficiently, and at scale?
Each organization will have its unique challenges, and AI should fit your business, not the other way around. By staying focused on your most pressing challenges, AI be a practical driver of ROI, often in under eight weeks. Are you ready to get started?
