Teesside University and TaperedPlus Limited KTP 24_25 R3

A small company that designs tapered steel foundations for streetlights, signs, and solar panels is building an AI system to automate its design and sales processes. TaperedPlus Limited currently relies on manual, expert-driven design for each custom foundation, which limits how many projects it can handle and slows down customer response times. The company is partnering with Teesside University to develop an AI-driven design and business intelligence system that uses natural language processing and large language models. This system will learn from the company’s existing design data and customer communications to automatically generate foundation specifications, produce quotes, and answer technical queries. If successful, the system could allow TaperedPlus to handle far more orders without hiring additional engineers, reducing lead times for infrastructure projects such as street lighting, traffic signs, and solar panel installations. The underlying approach—using AI to codify and automate niche engineering expertise—could also be adapted by other small manufacturers facing similar bottlenecks. The project is applied commercial research with a direct practical goal: embedding AI into a specific manufacturing workflow to unlock growth.