Textron Aviation enhances maintenance efficiency with Azure AI

Textron Aviation, a Textron Inc. company, is the producer of more than half of all general aviation aircraft flying today, including the iconic brands Cessna and Beechcraft. Its mission is to inspire the journey of flight for its customers located in more than 170 countries. For nearly 100 years, Textron Aviation has been committed to maintaining the highest standards of aircraft service that its customers expect.

To advance its mission, Textron Aviation has established 20 global service centers through a network staffed with nearly 3,000 employees. Customers have direct access to a team of expert service representatives offering maintenance and inspections, parts and repairs, avionic upgrades, equipment installations, refurbishments, and other specialized services. To ensure the highest level of service, maintaining more than 50 different aircraft models requires aircraft maintenance technicians (AMTs) to query more than 60,000 pages of documentation to get the detailed, accurate technical instructions they need. Although the information is available, it is often time-consuming to locate the specific details needed.

Increasing efficiencies with generative AI 

“We presented the challenge to Microsoft, emphasizing the need to provide technicians with quicker access to the information they need,” explains Brian Adams, Vice President of Aftermarket Innovation at Textron Aviation.

Textron Aviation saw a fit with generative AI to improve the AMT experience and reduce their upskilling time. It chose Microsoft to help ensure compliance with Textron Aviation’s data access and system policies and processes. 

“We weren’t just learning about generative AI for Textron Aviation,” says Adams. “We were learning for the whole enterprise, and that’s what steered us to Microsoft.”

Delivering fast, accurate, concise answers to technicians    

Textron Aviation selected Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing to build and deploy a generative AI solution that would serve as a quick, efficient one-stop shop for data its mechanics need. Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, the company created TAMI—the Textron Aviation Maintenance Intelligence assistant. TAMI has three layers: a chat layer that AMTs interact with, a middle layer that delivers decisions from key information stored in Azure, and a workflow ingestion sublayer that moves the data into a cognitive search location for TAMI to read.  

“TAMI quickly digests all of that data with accurate, concise answers for our AMTs,” says Adams. “We found Azure OpenAI Service provides capabilities beyond our traditional experiences, especially the ability for our mechanics to interact with TAMI using natural language—even multiple languages—and that became a real win for us.” 

Sean Wiles, an AMT using the Microsoft solution daily, adds, “As mechanics, there are many tools we rely on every day—a screwdriver and a 9/16 wrench. TAMI is now an added tool in our toolbox.​” 

​Reducing aircraft time under maintenance 

The company’s AMTs report that using TAMI saves time and helps to significantly improve workforce training and upskilling. Troubleshooting that previously took up to 20 minutes can now be accomplished in one to two minutes. The company is minimizing the time that aircraft are under maintenance, which ultimately translates to happier customers. Textron Aviation is now looking at ways to make use of generative AI throughout its manufacturing divisions.  

“TAMI is proving to be a competitive advantage for our service centers and our brand,” says Adams. “The success story of TAMI has leaders across the company talking about how we can deploy more Microsoft AI solutions—and the excitement around that is incredible.”    

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