168 Manufacturing: 12 documentation gaps found in 400 questions

168 Manufacturing makes the FullShop, a coolant system for CNC machine shops. We turned their documentation into an AI assistant their team and customers can ask anything. In the first 400 questions, it found 12 gaps nobody knew about.

168 Manufacturing builds the FullShop, a system that mixes coolant and delivers it to every CNC machine in a shop. Each install has a central feed unit, a sensor valve at every machine and a wireless network that ties them together. Installers, operators and 168’s sales partners all need technical answers, and a small team has to give them.

Knowledge in manuals, PDFs and a few heads

Writing technical documentation is slow, so the knowledge was spread over manuals, PDFs and the heads of a few people. And nobody could see what was missing. A gap only showed up when a customer asked the question nobody had written down.

An assistant that knows the FullShop

In a paid pilot in 2026, we turned 168’s documentation into an AI assistant for the FullShop Gen 3:

Ask anything. Installers and operators ask in plain language, by chat or by voice, and get an answer with a link to the section it comes from.
Checklists for the procedures. Installing and servicing the system comes with step-by-step checklists.
Field knowledge, reviewed. When someone corrects or adds something during a session, it becomes a note. 168 reviews every note before anything changes in the documentation.

12 gaps nobody knew about

The assistant turned out to be a test for the documentation itself. In the first 400 questions, it surfaced 12 gaps: things people asked about that the manuals did not cover. 168 had not known about them, and could now fix them before a customer ran into them.

Still running after the pilot

168 kept the assistant running after the pilot, and a public version answers questions about the FullShop for their customers. Since April, people have asked it more than 1,200 questions by chat, and spent over 4 hours with it by voice.

What we learned

An assistant is only as good as the documentation behind it. Where two of 168’s documents said slightly different things, the answers wavered too. Fixing that meant fixing the source, which is why every change now goes through 168’s own review.

That lesson is built into how Oneshot works today: instructions built from your sources, approved by your engineers and improved by the people who do the work.