AI for commercial heat treaters, tested on jobs you already accepted and certified.

Orders arrive short, and the trade knows it. In July 2022 the Metal Treating Institute, formed in Detroit in 1933, announced a one-page purchase order checklist written by a team of its commercial heat treaters, because key buying staff at manufacturers kept turning over and their replacements had to learn the purchase order and quality side of the work. In May 2026 it came back to the subject, warning that a vague or incomplete order upsets scheduling, furnace loading, quality verification, documentation and shipping while someone chases the detail. Contract review is where your shop finds out what's missing, and your files are full of finished ones.

Automotive customers bring a named assessment. AIAG released CQI-9, its Heat Treat System Assessment, in March 2006. An Industrial Heating article on auditing heat treaters, reprinted in Gear Technology in 2013, breaks each audit area into process and test equipment, pyrometry, process monitoring frequencies, in-process and final test frequencies, and quenchant and solution test frequencies. The fourth edition came out in June 2020 with updated pyrometry reporting and defined grace periods for calibrations, system accuracy tests and uniformity surveys. AIAG's work group, where automakers and their suppliers sit with heat treaters, lists clarifying the process tables and pyrometry requirements among its aims. Each of those items ends up as something a record has to show.

Customers stack their own rules on top. One automotive supplier's requirements document, dated May 2025, lists the heat treat assessment wherever it applies to the parts supplied, wants applicable assessments documented every year, and asks that safety and function records stay available for the life of the product, spare parts included, plus 15 years. At the ASM Heat Treating Society's 2021 conference in St. Louis, an engine maker described its own customized version of the CQI-9 audit for tier 1 and tier 2 heat treat suppliers. A certificate form that satisfies one account may not satisfy the next, and a sample of your own jobs will show how far apart they sit.

Both jobs already have an answer key. Every job you shipped left a contract review someone completed and a certificate someone signed. Set against those, an AI draft can be scored field by field by the person who did that work, with no need to imagine what good looks like. Keep automotive, tooling and general industrial jobs in the mix, because each kind of customer asks for different things.

The limit doesn't move. The proof of concept never touches your shop system, a furnace control, a live certificate or a live order. It never sets a recipe, judges a hardness reading, accepts a job or signs a certificate. A qualified person on your staff accepts every job, your quality manager signs every certificate, and defense and aerospace work stays out of the sample. Nothing on this page is legal or engineering advice.