Engineering
Your competitive position is written down in the documents your team is uploading.
For engineering and resources firms the exposure is usually commercial rather than personal. Tender pricing, methodology, geological interpretation, client drawings held under NDA. This is the material your competitors would most like to read, and much of it is covered by confidentiality deeds that predate anyone thinking about AI.
Request an assessmentYour obligation
Client NDAs rarely contemplate a third-party AI service
Most confidentiality deeds restrict disclosure to named parties and require information to be kept secure. Uploading a client’s drawings or data to an offshore service is a disclosure, and it is unlikely to be one your deed contemplates or permits. Where defence or critical infrastructure work is involved, obligations tighten further — controlled technical data can carry restrictions on access by foreign persons, and the consequences of getting that wrong extend well past a commercial dispute. Firms in the resources sector also routinely hold third-party data under licence terms that prohibit exactly this.
Where it’s happening
The four places we see it most
None of these are careless people. They are competent staff doing the work faster, using a tool that is genuinely good at it.
Tender and proposal drafting
Pricing, methodology and resourcing pasted in to polish the submission — the precise material that determines whether you win.
Technical report summarisation
Geological, environmental or structural reports condensed for a client, transmitting interpretation that took years to develop.
Specification and standards queries
Project-specific detail included alongside the question, revealing scope, location and design approach.
Code and script generation
Proprietary calculation methods and process logic pasted in for debugging, exposing genuinely differentiated IP.
The alternative
Same capability, nothing leaves
A private system does not ask your team to give anything up. It does the same work on the same documents — it simply does it on a machine you own, sitting in your own office.
See how it works →- Draft and refine tender responses without exposing pricing or methodology
- Summarise and query large technical report libraries
- Search internal standards, specifications and prior project work
- Assist with code and calculation scripts on genuinely proprietary methods
- Satisfy client confidentiality deeds without banning AI outright
Engineering & Resources: common questions
- Can this run at a remote site with no reliable connection?
- Yes — that is one of the stronger arguments for on-premise in the resources sector. The system does not need internet access to work. Once configured it operates entirely offline, which matters at a site office on a satellite link where a cloud tool is unusable regardless of policy.
- We work in the defence supply chain. Does this help?
- It removes the cross-border transmission problem, which is usually the hardest part to solve any other way. It does not automatically satisfy any particular security program requirement — those cover physical security, personnel vetting, network architecture and more. We would scope it against your actual obligations rather than claim blanket compliance, and we will tell you where the system does not get you there.
No obligation
Is this worth it for a firm like yours?
Tell us roughly how many people, what they handle, and what you suspect is already happening. We will give you a straight answer — including if the answer is that you do not need us.