Quick answer: Because a P&ID isn’t a picture, it’s a system. A 16-minute recording of an AI agent reading a pipeline drawing became Alena Busko’s 3-year-old’s favorite video: no music, no cartoons, just an agent moving through a graph database node by node, finding valves and tracing flow direction. The grandparents, a retired architect and a former design engineer, skipped the “squee” and asked how she sends engineering drawings to an AI. They’d tried. Zero success. Generic upload-and-pray tools guess at an image. Azati’s agent walks the P&ID graph and reasons through it step by step. So if your team has tried and failed: was the problem AI, or the approach?
The shallow lesson: chatbots will get better at images
Maybe. But a better guess at a picture is still a guess.
The real lesson: structure beats pixels
Turn the drawing into a graph (equipment, lines, valves, and flow direction as nodes and edges), then reason over that structure. Every step is traceable and checkable, which is what engineers need before they trust the answer.
The sobering part
Two people with decades of drawing experience still got nothing from general-purpose tools. Domain expertise can’t compensate for the wrong architecture. The method matters more than the model.
Full disclosure: this is the agent Azati built, so we’re not neutral. See our engineering AI work.
FAQ
Adapted from a LinkedIn post by Alena Busko, CMO at Azati – read the original.
