By Alex Smith |
Italian engineering group MAIRE has connected Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry with Autodesk Forma and Revit, giving its engineers natural-language access to complex project data directly within Microsoft Teams.
The company, which provides technology and project solutions to the energy and chemicals sector, employs more than 10,000 people worldwide. Facing tighter margins and rising client expectations, MAIRE to reduce the time engineers spent searching for data across disconnected systems, a bottleneck contributing to rework and project delays.
“Staying competitive means more than adding new tools,” said Michele Mariella, chief information officer at MAIRE. “We set out to design a digital landscape that could evolve with the business, one that would help our engineers navigate complexity, collaborate across disciplines, and prepare the company for the next decade of innovation.”
MAIRE’s rollout built on an existing Microsoft cloud foundation, where documentation and processes had already been standardised, creating the groundwork for AI adoption at scale. The company then extended that intelligence into engineering workflows by linking Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio to Autodesk’s design and modelling tools, allowing engineers to interact with project data conversationally rather than navigating multiple platforms.
“In engineering and construction, we operate in a high-complexity, low-margin environment,” said Marco Pecoraro, engineering process digitalisation head at MAIRE. “By connecting Microsoft technology and Autodesk solutions, we’ve made our engineering and project data usable through natural language, so teams get immediate answers and can act faster, with less rework and less risk.”
The integration enables engineers to search across thousands of models, issues and documents without switching systems. “What makes this powerful is not AI on its own, but how it's embedded into engineering workflows,” said Stefano Toparini, principal enterprise account technical lead at Autodesk.
With AI-readable documentation now available at all times, MAIRE reports faster onboarding and fewer errors across its global teams, while AI-based quality checks and generative modelling are shortening cycle times. The company’s goal is to redirect engineers’ time toward higher-value, more complex project scopes while AI absorbs routine and data-heavy tasks.
“This evolution of our operating model enhances the efficiency of engineering workflows, shortens schedule durations, and generates tangible cost improvements across the project lifecycle,” said Pecoraro, who traced the initiative back to MAIRE’s original adoption of Microsoft Azure nearly a decade ago, followed by the Autodesk partnership and, more recently, Microsoft 365 Copilot and MAIRE’s internal NEXTBRAINS platform.
More than 200 engineers are now developing AI agents at MAIRE, with over 100 agentic solutions moving toward enterprise deployment, covering use cases from simulating new plant technologies to exploring physical AI and robotics for construction and safety.
Mariella pointed to a shift in employee engagement as one of the clearest signs of impact. “Before, people waited for technology,” he said. “Now they come to us and say, ‘Give me the tool – I want to improve myself and the people around me.’”
“The real business outcome isn't a number,” Mariella added. “It's people getting involved in designing our future through this technology.”