Kuken Industries uses OpenAI API to search decades of drawings

What the company built

Kuken Industries has connected the OpenAI API to its archive of cooling tower drawings, according to OpenAI News. The archive spans 70 years of engineering documents.

The system lets engineers search that collection by asking for what they need, rather than browsing manually.

Time saved on repairs

OpenAI reports that an engineer can now find the drawing needed for a repair in 4.5 minutes. Before the system was introduced, the same task took close to an hour.

That reduction matters because crews often need the correct drawing before repair work can begin.

Why it matters

Long-standing industrial firms often hold decades of paper or scanned records that are hard to search. This case shows how large language models can make such archives usable in day-to-day work.

The figures come from OpenAI's own announcement, so they reflect the company's description of the deployment rather than independent testing.