Automate your Inventor designs with the AI-based Autodesk Assistant

by Chris Smith

The Autodesk Assistant agent is being introduced to Autodesk Inventor to provide users with a personalised, context‑aware conversational automation experience tailored specifically for mechanical design and manufacturing workflows. Its capabilities include guiding users through Inventor commands and modelling practices, extracting and interpreting information from parts and assemblies, and automating repetitive tasks - such as generating and managing Model States - directly through typed or spoken natural language prompts.

These automations can be performed in a fluid, dialogue‑driven environment where tasks evolve as the conversation progresses. As the Assistant gathers more context about the model and the user’s intent, it can refine, adjust, or expand the requested operations, enabling a more intuitive and efficient way to create variations, suppress features, adjust parameters, and build structured Model States without manual repetition.

Automating model states

A frequent challenge for Inventor users is creating multiple variations of a part - each with different parameters, suppressed features, or configuration rules. Traditionally, building these Model States one by one is time‑consuming and repetitive. With the Autodesk Assistant, this becomes a conversational automation task: you describe what you want, provide the input data, and the AI constructs the Model States for you.

One practical scenario is generating Model States directly from an Excel table. Instead of manually copying values, you simply instruct the Assistant, and it interprets the spreadsheet, maps columns to parameters, and builds each state automatically.

A prompt might look like this:

I would like to help adding model states to the open part file. I have 3 tables in an Excel spreadsheet for different flange sizes based on the Flange standard and inch bore sizes. The tables are as follows... Please create a new flange model state for each flange option. The model states should be labelled as "Flange Standard" - "Inch bore size".

The Assistant then explains how it reads the table, how it assigns parameters and feature states, and provides a clear summary of the steps it performs while generating the Model States.

Conclusion

The Autodesk Assistant for Inventor is still in its Tech Preview phase, which means it has limitations and may occasionally produce imperfect results. Even so, it already demonstrates clear value: tasks that traditionally take hours - such as building dozens of Model States from spreadsheets or configuring repetitive parameter changes - can now be completed in minutes through simple conversational instructions.

These time and cost savings are achieved entirely with out‑of‑the‑box functionality. No extra add‑ins, custom scripts, or API development are required. As the Assistant continues to evolve, its growing capabilities will help engineering teams deliver designs faster, reduce manual workload, and keep projects on schedule and within budget.