Accelerating Engineering Excellence with AI
Ideal Shift AI partnered with a top Australian engineering firm to develop a focused AI strategy that improves project planning, staffing, and delivery. The goal was to empower teams to work smarter, deliver higher-quality outcomes, and improve profitability.
How can engineers spend less time drafting and more time engineering?
At “X”, a leading engineering and design firm in Australia, project teams were weighed down by repetitive tasks—manual fee proposals, data entry, and task estimation. These inefficiencies hurt productivity, delivery quality, and staff morale.
The goal? Free up time for real engineering, improve consistency, and boost margins.
That’s where Ideal Shift AI came in.
In just 10 weeks, the Ideal Shift AI team designed a tailored AI strategy and implementation roadmap using the MIT AI Strategy Framework—custom-fit to “X”’s tech, data, and business needs. The roadmap focused on three clear outcomes: better quality, higher efficiency, and stronger profitability.
How the plan comes to life
Smarter proposal workflows
“X” plans to automate fee proposals with GenAI and Azure ML—extracting scopes from RFQs, suggesting pricing based on 500+ past projects, and generating structured proposals.
Efficient task planning
Predictive models plan to estimate task durations and recommend optimal team setups using past timesheet data—supporting faster, smarter decisions.
A unified data foundation
A centralized Azure Data Lake plans to merge siloed systems, enabling real-time reporting, scalable AI deployment, and seamless automation.
Live project dashboards
Power BI dashboards will track profitability, staff efficiency, and surface bottlenecks in real time—giving leadership a clear view of performance.
Why it works
We focus on human-centric AI—combining machine learning with employee insights. Fast MVPs build momentum, while cloud-native infrastructure ensures the solutions scale.
What's next
- Rollout across business units
- Continuous model retraining
- Launch of internal AI community
- Exploring GenAI for client interactions
From Strategy to Action
By investing in AI that works for people rather than instead of people, “X” is redefining how engineering firms operate, delivering better results while empowering their teams.