Paperless Parts has transformed how custom part manufacturers evaluate, quote, and win new work. With artificial intelligence technologies maturing, we are excited to embrace these tools to automate some of the repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks that shops need to perform as part of every quote. By embracing these technologies to automate administrative tasks and quickly surface objective information, we believe we will enable our customers to simplify their workflows and build more consistent processes, empower their employees to be more productive, and improve profitability by driving clarity on what to quote and when.

AI Guiding Principles

Paperless Parts values our customers’ trust above all else. As such, we have adopted a set of guiding principles to ensure we continue to inspire confidence in our solution:

Security & Compliance: Following FedRAMP and NIST standards as a guide, we have implemented and maintain strict controls throughout our organization, computing infrastructure, and application. These controls apply to the AI features in our application and the R&D processes we use to develop and train AI models. We have designed our AI-supported features so they can be used by customers with CMMC Level 2 requirements.

We do not send customer data to any non-compliant 3rd party AI tools or systems.

Use of Customer Data: Customer data is never used to create a competitive advantage for another customer. We do not share or expose customer-specific data across customers. Custom pricing formulas, pricing breakdowns including margins, material costs, labor assumptions, internal notes, and information about your customers are never shared with or presented to other customers. If multiple customers upload the same or similar part, the system does not share, infer, or reveal pricing between them. Each customer’s quoting experience remains independent, and our platform does not provide information that advantages one customer based on another customer’s data.

We use data in a controlled and abstracted manner to improve the performance of our platform. This may include learning from patterns or statistics across the industry. We have also developed patent-pending and peer-reviewed approaches to privacy-preserving AI models that extract information from technical data in ways specifically designed for handling sensitive data, including Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).

Our services and support teams may use approved AI tools to assist in supporting customers, in accordance with our security and compliance standards.

Transparency & Human Review: Our AI features are designed to assist, not replace, human judgment. The platform clearly identifies when AI-generated suggestions are being made and provides users with full control to accept, modify, or reject them. Final decisions always remain with the user.

Testing & Continuous Improvement: We maintain a rigorous process for developing and deploying AI capabilities. All features are tested against defined benchmarks prior to release, and we continuously evaluate performance, gather customer feedback, and refine our models to ensure they deliver meaningful and reliable value in real-world quoting workflows.

FAQs:

What is Paperless Parts Wingman™?

Paperless Parts Wingman™ is a collection of AI-supported automation and shortcuts within Paperless Parts designed to help estimators quote faster and avoid mistakes that come with rote, repetitive tasks. Wingman provides auto-fill suggestions of objective, technical information from RFQs and prints to enable estimators to make more informed decisions about their approach to manufacturing a part. Estimators can then get to what they do best faster: leveraging their expertise. The presence of a purple graphic denotes Wingman offering a suggestion or recommending an action.

Refer to our Knowledge Base article to learn more or view up-to-date, specific examples of AI-supported automation currently available in the platform.

What type of data do you use to train your models?

Paperless Parts’ AI models are trained using the technical data contained within an RFQ package, such as prints, emails, and other attached documents. Importantly, we do not use any information about how our customers cost parts, what they employ as pricing strategies, or any custom P3L in any way. Our models focus on identifying the critical, easy-to-miss details within prints and other RFQ documents vital to setting up your quote and conducting your costing steps. Furthermore, we do not train any models to be used in generative AI applications using customer data, thereby eliminating the risk of confidential data exposure through AI features.

Who has access to my data?

The security of your information is paramount, and we develop and deploy all of our models within our FedRAMP boundary and in a CMMC, NIST, and FedRAMP Moderate-compliant manner. Your data may be used to help train or validate AI models in ways permitted by our general terms and cybersecurity policies; however, Paperless Parts has strict data controls in place that ensure that your data is not shared with other customers or anyone other than authorized Paperless Parts team members, all of whom are US Persons.

How accurate are your AI models?

We measure and validate the accuracy of every AI model within our platform. Based on user feedback on AI-powered suggestions, we continue to improve the accuracy of our models. We do not guarantee the accuracy of suggestions due to the inherent limits of AI and stress the importance of human review of AI suggestions.

Paperless Parts uses industry-standard Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to generate our AI-powered suggestions, which can extract text from most PDFs of reasonable quality. The accuracy of AI suggestions will depend on the print quality—it will not work well on hand-written or poor-quality PDFs.

How do you protect sensitive data (including CUI) from unauthorized disclosure when used with AI features?

Generative AI models are a good solution to certain problems in manufacturing. Care must be taken when using sensitive data for training or inference with generative AI. Paperless Parts does not use AI in ways that could potentially leak sensitive data (for example, we do not provide generative output to one user that has been trained on another user’s data). Our approach has been peer-reviewed and presented at the 2024 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference. You can read our paper, “Privacy-Preserving AI for Document Understanding with Controlled Unclassified Information” for technical details.

For additional questions on the use of AI within Paperless Parts, please contact [email protected].

Originally Published: February 12, 2024
Updated: April 10, 2026