By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
An AI assistant that can place steel orders and release nests needs shop-floor limits. What to scope, what to cap, and the one action that stays human.
Key takeaways
You tried an AI assistant in the office in 2024. It wrote emails and summarized a specification, and you decided it was a toy. Fair enough.
The 2026 version is not a toy and not the same thing. Today the assistant sitting on your shop network can place a purchase order with the service center, send a customer a price, update the traveler, email a certificate of conformance, and push a nest to the laser. Every one of those is a real action with real consequences, and one of them cannot be taken back.
A wrong email gets a correction. A wrong purchase order gets canceled inside the day, or costs you a restocking fee. A wrong quote gets withdrawn, awkwardly.
Once the laser cuts a 5 by 10 sheet of quarter-inch 304 on a superseded revision, that sheet is scrap. So is the fitting labor already spent on it, and so is the ship date if the plate is on a two-week lead time. The same is true of the shear, the press brake on a formed part with the wrong bend allowance, and the drill line on a beam. Metal is the one thing in your building that does not have an undo button.
Agent security in a fabrication shop comes down to one line: the assistant may prepare anything, but it may only finish the things you can take back.
Here is the part owners find genuinely surprising. Once the assistant reads your email and your incoming documents, anything written in those documents is something it might treat as an instruction. A supplier email with a line buried in the footer, a PDF with white text hidden on the page, a request-for-quote packet containing a note aimed at whatever software processes it.
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You do not need a criminal for this to hurt you. A general contractor's automatic email footer that says "confirm receipt and proceed" is enough for an over-permissioned assistant to confirm something you did not agree to. The 2024 version could only draft a reply. The 2026 version has your outbox, your ordering account and, if you let it, the queue on your burn table.
The accepted answer this year is straightforward, and it is closer to how you already run your shop than to anything from a software company: give the assistant the least authority that lets it do the job, give it its own login rather than yours, scope it to one system at a time, and keep a person's hand on anything that cannot be undone.
flowchart TD
A["Assistant builds the nest for job 42310"] --> B["Checks drawing revision against the approved set"]
B --> C{"Revision current and material on hand?"}
C -->|No| D["Job parked, message to the CNC programmer"]
D --> A
C -->|Yes| E["Nest queued as pending release, not sent to the table"]
E --> F{"Programmer or quality manager presses release?"}
F -->|No| D
F -->|Yes| G["Laser cuts, assistant updates the traveler and reorders plate under the cap"]
Write the assistant's permissions the way you would write a new hire's. You would not give a temp in the office the ability to sign purchase orders on day one, and you would not let him release goods. Same list:
Assumptions: 5 ft by 10 ft sheet of quarter-inch 304 at 520 lb and $4.20 per pound landed, laser time and assist gas at $3.10 per minute, 38-minute nest, fit-up labor already spent before the error is caught at 6.5 hours, shop rate $95, expedited replacement plate freight, 22 nests released in a normal week.
| Line | Basis | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Sheet scrapped | 520 lb × $4.20, less scrap value | $2,020 |
| Machine time burned | 38 min × $3.10 | $118 |
| Fit-up labor lost | 6.5 hr × $95 | $618 |
| Expedited replacement plate freight | counter pickup, two-hour round trip | $340 |
| Late shipment back-charge | when the ship date cannot be recovered | $1,500 |
| One wrong-revision burn | $4,596 | |
| Cost of the release gate | 22 nests/week × 40 sec × 50 weeks at $85 | $1,038 per year |
If the gate stops one wrong burn a year it pays four times over. It also does something the table cannot show: it keeps the revision check as a habit at the exact moment somebody is tempted to skip it, which is the Thursday you are behind on a Friday ship.
Open whatever assistant you already have running — the one drafting quotes or sorting the shop inbox — and write down two lists. First, everything it can currently do that ends in a physical or financial result: send, order, pay, release, cut. Second, who approves each of those today when a person does it.
Then make the second list govern the first. Anything without a human name beside it gets turned off until it has one. That exercise takes an hour with your operations manager, costs nothing, and is worth more than any software you buy this quarter.
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The release of anything that cuts, bends, drills or welds metal. Not because the assistant is bad at nesting — the nesting software has been better than a person at yield for years — but because the release is the last point at which somebody confirms this is the current revision and this is the right heat of material for a job that needs traceability.
Material substitution stays human too. Swapping A572 Grade 50 for A36 because it is what is in the rack is sometimes fine and sometimes a code violation, and the difference depends on the drawing, the connection and the inspector. So does anything involving a welder qualification, a procedure qualification record or a signature on an inspection report. Those carry your certification, and certifications belong to people.
Finally, the customer conversation when something has gone wrong. An assistant can tell you the ship date slipped. It should not be the thing that tells your customer.
Then the assistant does not touch the ERP directly. Have it produce a file or a draft that a person imports, which is slower and completely safe. Plenty of shops on older E2 or Global Shop versions run exactly this way, and it still saves the typing.
It will if you make it a single yes button. Make the approval show the three things a person can actually check in ten seconds: revision letter, material grade and heat, and quantity against the traveler. Approvals that display evidence get read. Approvals that display a question get clicked.
A quote is a number that goes out of your building with your name on it and a signature block that binds you. If it can send, it can send wrong. Cap it: it drafts, a person sends, and anything above a dollar threshold you set gets your eyes regardless.
That is the highest-risk inbox in your shop, and it is also where the new work comes from. Let it read and summarize those all day. Do not let it act on them — no ordering, no scheduling, no sending — until a human has looked. Unknown sender, human hands.
Most shops start with the safest useful thing an assistant can do, which is answer the phone and the web chat without touching anything in the shop. CallSphere builds AI voice and chat agents that pick up your line 24/7, capture the caller's material, quantity and drawing details, book the site visit or the callback, and hand the whole record to your estimator — with no authority to release a job, place an order or change a price. That is a sensible first step, and it is a good model for everything you let an assistant do afterwards.
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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