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Company Brain for maintenance procedures
Short answer
An AI knowledge base in maintenance finds the procedure for a specific machine and situation, shows its version and source, and leaves decisions about work on the machine to approved procedures and authorised people. An AI application on company documents costs from €3,000 net at Syntalith. At 500 technicians' questions a month and 12 minutes of searching each, it pays back in 1.0 months.
How we workDetails ↓
- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- net per application, fixed price before contract
- from €3,000
- from signing the contract to acceptance
- 4–10 weeks
- free prototype on your documents
- €0
We belong to the OpenAI and Anthropic partner programmes and learn through their official courses. What this means ↓
Author: Syntalith · 3 min read
Statistics
Maintenance knowledge and AI: statistics 2026
1.0 mo.
payback of €3,000 at 500 technicians' questions a month: €3,490 of work today, €532 with checking and the model. Scenario.
49%
According to Anthropic (2024), combining contextual embeddings with BM25 search cut failed retrievals by 49%, and by 67% with reranking.
30%
According to Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond (2025), less experienced support agents with AI raised the number of issues resolved an hour by 30%.
Source: Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2025) ↗
48%
According to the European Commission (2026), 48% of small and medium-sized companies in the EU name a lack of expertise as a barrier to AI.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 578 (2026) ↗
17.3%
According to Eurostat (2025), 17.3% of EU manufacturing companies used AI.
Source: Eurostat, AI by NACE activity (isoc_eb_ain2) (2025) ↗
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
Several copies of a manual on the shared drive
A technician looks for the service instruction for a compressor. The shared drive holds three copies, and the first one found looks right but covers an earlier version of the machine. An experienced colleague says something different from the document, because he remembers an approved change nobody added to the old copy. Adding a chat to such a set only serves up the outdated file faster.
- A question with a correct answer and its source
- A question the documents cannot answer
- A conflict between two versions of a manual
- A document available only to a chosen role
- A version change and access removed after the test
If the documents carry no version, machine or owner, part of the project is ordering the knowledge, with time needed on the company's side. The contractor does not decide the applicable technical procedure from the most similar file. You measure the time to a verified source and the cases that need an expert, and the number of chat answers is no count of solved problems.
What it costs and when it pays back
- Today
- 500 technicians' questions × 12 min = 100 h (€3,490)
- With the system, a person checks the result in 15% of the time
- €524
- Model, 1 call per case, Claude Sonnet 5.5
- €8
- Cost of one case
- €6.98 today, €1.06 with the system
- Saving
- €2,958 a month
Payback of €3,000
1.0 months
The volume, the time and the checking share are the scenario's assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat. Model: 6,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens per call at Anthropic's rates, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
The model is a small item here. The result depends on the time that searching and asking around take today, and on how much of it remains for checking the answer. In maintenance a version error costs more than the search, because the technician works from an old instruction. We count such cases separately in the trial.
Before we price the build, we run a test on 20 to 100 questions the team has already asked: we compare the application's answer with what the employee found by hand, and we count the time from the question to the source. The test takes 5 working days and costs €0.
Search, a platform or your own assistant
If there are few documents and the problem is naming, order in the repository and better search are enough. Microsoft, in preparing knowledge for Copilot, stresses current content, owners and permissions. A ready platform fits when the sources and permissions sit in one environment. A custom system is justified when it links documentation, the equipment register and separate access rules. Local processing is a separate decision, covered in the post on a local model for confidential quotes.
Few documents, a naming problem
order in the repository
no application
Sources in one environment
a ready platform
the vendor's licence
Documentation, an equipment register and roles
an assistant linking the sources
from €3,000
Where to start
The first scope is the procedures for one group of machines, with a documentation owner. The scope is described in private ChatGPT for maintenance teams.
For the first call, one question that keeps coming back to colleagues and where the team looks for the answer are enough. You do not need to send confidential documents, and you receive the written plan within 2 working days.
Worked example · Scenario
How we count the payback: maintenance procedures
We run the same count for your plant in the free review.
€2,792
a month for finding answers to 400 questions in documents
Payback: 1.3 mo.
Our assumptions are 12 minutes to find the documentation and work order history for a machine, and checking in 15% of the old time. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. Model cost: Claude Sonnet 5.5, about 6,000 + 500 tokens per answer from documents, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
See the full calculation →
