Most manufacturing teams have access to powerful AI tools, but those tools don’t know anything about their specific process. They’re general-purpose, and while useful for drafting text or answering broad questions, are disconnected from the actual system you’re trying to improve.

The AI Assistant in Threaded is different. It operates with full context of your organization including your instruction set, your value stream, your parts and tools, your actions, and your org info. This turns AI into a collaborator that understands what you build and how you build it, not just a chatbot you have to explain everything to from scratch.

#Agentic Capabilities

AI in Threaded can give you advice and analysis of your operation, but it doesn’t stop there — it can also act. It can execute changes directly in the platform on your behalf, not just telling you what to do. Almost anything a user can do in the app can also be accomplished by the AI, including updating work instructions, creating and assigning actions, and making changes to your process.

When the AI proposes an action, it presents a summary of what it intends to do and waits for your confirmation before executing. You review the proposed changes and click “Execute” to apply them, or dismiss them if you want to take a different approach. The AI acts only on your approval, and you remain in control throughout.

This human-in-the-loop approach means you can delegate repetitive or time-consuming tasks to the AI — like updating a step across multiple procedures, or creating a set of action items from an analysis — while maintaining full visibility and control over what actually changes in your system.

#Accessing the AI Assistant

Click the AI Assistant icon in the top navigation bar to open the chat sidebar, which is accessible from anywhere in Threaded. you can close the sidebar by clicking on the close arrow, or view the as a full page with the expand button.

Each conversation starts fresh by default, but the AI has access to memory from previous conversations and can reference past discussions when relevant. To start a new chat, click the + at the top of the AI assistant sidebar, or to access a prior chat, click the history icon right next to it.

#How Context Works

The quality of the AI’s responses depends directly on the context it has access to. A general-purpose AI has to work from whatever you tell it in the moment, which means you spend as much time explaining your process as actually improving it. Threaded solves this by building context into the conversation from the start, and giving you tools to add more when you need it. Threaded provides context to the AI in several ways:

#Automatic Context

Every conversation automatically includes a high-level summary of your organization: your instruction set structure, value stream, parts and tools, actions, and the Organization Info you’ve configured under Admin. The AI also has tools to navigate this complex structure to target specific parts of your process in response to the user’s prompts. The more information you put into Threaded, the more relevant and specific the AI’s responses will be to help you engineer and scale your process.

#Adding Context with @mentions

Type @ in the chat to pin specific objects into the conversation as focused context. The AI has direct access to anything you @mention and can analyze, reference, and reason about it specifically. You can @mention:

Process nodes and procedures
Parts and tools
Actions
Media files
Organization members
Previous AI conversations

For a full breakdown of what can be @mentioned and where, see Search and Mentions.

#Attaching Files

Click the paperclip icon below the chat window to attach external files—documents, spreadsheets, images, PDFs, and more. This is useful for bringing in reference material, supplier data, quality reports, or any other context that lives outside of Threaded. Files brought into context through chat can also be saved for future reference in the media library by clicking the “Save to Organization Media” icon in the chip for the attached file.

#Conversation History

By default, the AI includes memory from previous conversations as context, so it can reference prior discussions and build on past analysis. To start a fully clean session without previous conversation context, click the conversation history icon next to the model selector to disable it in the event that you want to start completely fresh.

#Model Selection

Threaded gives you access to multiple frontier AI models, all in the same platform. You can switch models using the model selector below the chat window, and current options include Claude Sonnet 4.6, Grok 4, Gemini 3 Flash Preview, and GPT-4o. Different models may perform better on different types of tasks, so if one isn’t giving you what you need, switching is a quick way to get a different perspective.

#Tips for Getting the Most Out of the AI

Add context before asking — @mention the specific procedures, nodes, or parts you want to analyze before asking your question. AI performs significantly better when it has focused context rather than working from a broad org-level summary alone.
Be specific about your goal — “Analyze my Powder Coat operation for bottlenecks” will get you a more useful response than “analyze my process.”
Use it as a collaborator, not just a search tool — ask follow-up questions, push back on recommendations, and ask the AI to explain its reasoning. The best results come from a back-and-forth conversation.
Let it act — if the AI suggests a change and you agree with it, use the Execute workflow rather than making the change manually. It’s faster and keeps the conversation in context.
Start a new conversation when shifting focus — the AI works best when a conversation is focused on a single goal or topic. When you move to a new problem, start a new chat.

#What the AI Can Help With

The AI Assistant is useful across the full range of work in Threaded:

Work Instructions — draft new procedures, improve existing steps, check for clarity and completeness, and make bulk updates across your instruction set. Process CI checks for work instructions are also focused, applied AI tools that automate tedious reviews for things like technical writing and image quality across the process.
Process Analysis — identify constraints and bottlenecks, analyze line balance, compare Process Plan vs Actuals, and estimate the impact of proposed changes
Continuous Improvement — surface improvement opportunities, help prioritize actions, and connect floor feedback to process changes
Parts and Tools — analyze usage, identify supply chain dependencies, and help populate or clean up your parts and tools tables
Scenario and Project Planning — ask how to double production in a given timeframe, or to provide a plan to launch production of a new product. It will outline a plan and create actions for users to accomplish to complete the objective.
General Manufacturing Knowledge — ask about lean principles, industry standards, technical writing, or any manufacturing concept and get answers in the context of your specific process

For detailed examples and prompts organized by use case, see AI Assistant Use Cases.

The AI Assistant