Kuken Industries searches 70 years of drawings in minutes

Kuken Industries, a Japanese manufacturer of air conditioning and ventilation equipment, holds a major share of Japan’s cooling tower market. When replacement parts are needed for cooling towers, engineers must consult an archive of drawings spanning 70 years. Previously, finding the right drawing often required asking experienced colleagues, and searches could take half a day. Kuken digitized the archive but still faced challenges because engineers needed to know names or numbers and where to look. To enable engineers at all levels to search independently, Kuken partnered with Recursive, a Japanese AI startup and official OpenAI partner. Together they built a search system and field app using OpenAI’s models, which proved accurate and cost-effective. Engineers can search by part number or upload images/PDFs, and the app returns possible matches. Kuken reports the tool is expected to cut drawing search time by about 90% over a year. Experienced engineers use saved time to mentor, while newer engineers handle more work independently. Engineers now spend more time studying drawings and exploring design improvements. Takatsugu Naraki, Director and Factory Manager, noted that people now have time to try new challenges, boosting motivation. Kuken is also developing an AI tool to review partner drawings, with prototype testing showing about 90% of flagged issues were genuine discrepancies. The company aims to pass engineering experience to the next generation.

(Source：OpenAI)