Nitto Kogyo develops AI to read drawings for electrical-panel quotations
Nitto Kogyo has developed an application with IBM Japan that reads building drawings for electrical distribution-board quotations. AI extracts circuit details, equipment information and special notes, while sales staff check and correct the results. An environment has been prepared for approximately 50 employees at 23 Japanese sales locations. The phased October deployment accompanies work to organize specialist knowledge across the company.
Artificial Intelligence··Midday
Drawings become information for a quotation
Nitto Kogyo has developed an application with IBM Japan that extracts information for electrical distribution-board quotations from building drawings. The October 20 announcement describes a web application using multimodal generative AI, which handles images and text. Circuit details, equipment information and special notes are extracted when a drawing is uploaded. AI Watch also reports the application’s development and its phased introduction into the company’s work.[1], [2]
An operating environment has been prepared for approximately 50 sales employees across 23 Japanese locations. IBM’s announcement schedules phased use in actual operations for October; AI Watch reports that the phased use began during the month. In the workflow, AI reads the drawings and organizes the information. Sales staff then apply their business knowledge to check and correct the extracted results.[1], [2]
Sales expertise is organized across the company
Quotation work requires staff to interpret drawings in formats that differ by project, consider legal requirements and product specifications, and decide on the equipment and circuit arrangement. This specialized work can depend on particular employees’ experience. The companies spent about a year and a half organizing quotation expertise, structuring business knowledge and defining the responsibilities of people and AI. They also store extraction results and employees’ corrections as structured data, aiming to make that knowledge usable and transferable across the organization.[1]
Feedback will guide the next stage
The system uses the reference architecture of IBM Japan’s integrated AI platform and is designed to avoid dependence on a particular model or system environment. The companies say the model-independent design is intended to accommodate changes in technology and business requirements. They are considering governance, security and architecture for wider organizational AI use. They plan to use feedback from sales staff to improve drawing-reading accuracy and ease of use and expand the types of drawings supported. Possible later applications include design, production and maintenance, drawing on data accumulated through quotation work and Nitto Kogyo’s existing expertise.[1]
