As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, it’s helping engineers solve problems that were previously out of reach.
Australia has a well-known shortage of engineering talent and the need continues to grow.
According to Engineers Australia, the country’s engineering skills and labour shortage is the highest it’s been in more than 10 years. Although the supply of qualified engineers has been increasing, just 8.5 per cent of Australian graduates have an engineering qualification. Professionals Australia projects that by 2040, Australia will be short 200,000 engineers.
That’s why it’s so important for engineers to embrace the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence (AI), said Brett Casson, Director of Architecture, Engineering and Construction Strategy for Autodesk, a leader in design and make software.
“There is a talent gap and, from what we observe, the talent gap’s widening,” Casson said.
“We think that automation and AI is a really good way of bridging that gap. Our customers think this as well; we speak to the engineering community who are users of Autodesk technology, and they are positive about AI.”
And far from AI replacing engineers, Casson said, the technology is already helping the existing cohort handle an ever-growing workload.
“There’s a myth that the machine will take away capacity or take away from the work that engineers do,” he said.
“We actually see the opposite in that we have a capacity problem. The more that our technology can support automation and assist engineering as a field, the better off we’ll be.”
It’s not just productivity that will be positively affected by AI. Casson said the technology will also help engineers deliver more sustainable outcomes.
“The foundational piece of sustainability is data – data to inform the design, data to construct, and data to manage and operate at the end,” he said.
Beyond large language models
According to Casson, the generative text that large language models offer has been the most significant AI tool used in the engineering sector thus far. And while that is providing substantial benefits now, he expects the landscape to change rapidly.
Where engineers once spent significant time responding to tenders or requests for proposals, they can now utilise large language models to gather great amounts of historic information and generate the necessary documents.
“It’s solving that problem at scale, which is really important, because our engineering community doesn’t have capacity nor human resources to do that,” Casson said.
“But in the future, engineers imagine that they’re going to use AI increasingly more in design and engineering. I will ask an AI to design something for me with not only robustness, but also accuracy and precision.”
The engineers Casson speaks to are particularly interested in AI’s capacity to provide insights beyond the ability of humans to readily deliver.
“The Australian engineering community have access to a wealth of data — not only current project-based data, but historic data portfolios of potentially hundreds of years of engineering excellence,” he said.
“What they want is to be able to bring some of that siloed data together to be able to form a position or start to query it. Historically, that’s been almost impossible; there are so many different data sets, data sources, and data standards for every single engineering discipline.”
With AI, engineers are able to draw together information from structural and civil design, for instance, to make sense of it and glean insights. Even being able to construct a simple dashboard that combines these disparate data sources can give engineers an edge in solving problems they were previously unable to broach.
And while the technology is still evolving, Casson predicts engineers will one day be able to use generative AI for CAD geometry.
“Then customers will be able to leverage our technology to do some of that heavy lifting, because it’s a very complicated thing to do,” he said.
“They will apply their engineering rigour to that answer as well. It’s not about complete reliance on the machine; it’s about having the machine augment, assist, and automate to do all those things that a machine is really good at to produce a solution.”
Overcoming a lapse in confidence
Despite the immense opportunity offered by AI, Casson cautions that Autodesk’s research reveals that confidence in the technology may be tapering. According to the company’s 2025 State of Design and Make report, 68 per cent of respondents in Australia believe AI will enhance their industry, down nine per cent from last year.
“There is some trepidation, in that they feel AI is not moving as fast as they would like it to move,” he said.
“This sentiment will start to subside because we’ve been very intentional in the last few months around our capabilities, what we’re doing with AI, and how we’re using it to help solve customer problems. Vertical industry-specific applications of AI are coming. These tools will reason in three dimensions and generate not only text, but CAD objects.”
Ultimately, that capacity for problem-solving will provide immense opportunity – not only for Autodesk’s customers, but for the entire Australian economy.
“We have this thirst for new infrastructure in Australia and we’re a country that prides itself on great engineering,” Casson said.
“Think about the number of problems that we can solve if we use AI in the right way to solve these huge engineering problems at scale. We’re going to solve the capacity problem, but think about what we can do as a nation. We’re going to be able to build things we’ve never even imagined before.”
