The Autodesk Assistant is a promising addition to Inventor, but every conversation currently starts from scratch. Users must repeatedly enter the same instructions, standards, and engineering knowledge.
I would like Autodesk to introduce Skills for the Autodesk Assistant.
A Skill would be a reusable set of instructions that users can create, manage, and execute on demand. Instead of repeatedly typing prompts, users could simply invoke a named skill.
Examples include:
- Company drawing standard reviews
- iProperty validation
- BOM consistency checks
- Documentation reviews
- Customer-specific design requirements
The real value is not automation itself, but capturing engineering knowledge in a form that can be reused by individuals, teams, and organizations.
Skills should:
- Be easy to create using natural language
- Be discoverable through the Assistant
- Support personal, shared, and company-wide skills
- Be treated as managed assets, similar to external iLogic rules
- Support versioning and ownership
Unlike traditional rule-based automation, like iLogic, Autodesk Assistant can explain findings, answer questions, and help users resolve issues that it identifies. This makes skills accessible to engineers who understand the process but do not have programming experience.
During experimentation, I found that a simplified version of this concept can already be achieved today by storing reusable instructions in external iLogic rules and asking Autodesk Assistant to execute them. This demonstrates that reusable engineering knowledge can provide real value within Inventor.
More details and an example can be found here:
Creating Reusable Prompts for the Autodesk Assistant
If users are already creating workarounds to achieve this functionality, it may be worth considering formal support for reusable Skills within Autodesk Assistant.
