Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence says pairing artificial intelligence with computed tomography (CT) scanning is helping manufacturers catch defects that scanning alone would miss, according to comments made on a recent episode of Plant Services' "Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast." The company describes the combination as a way to cut false accepts and false rejects in quality inspection, while processing far more scan data than a human reviewer could handle unassisted.
Industrial CT already differs from traditional inspection methods by capturing both the internal and external geometry of a part in a single scan. That single dataset can support GD&T inspection, material analysis, and evaluation of fiber orientation in composite parts, without a separate destructive test or teardown. Feeding that data through AI models, according to Hexagon, speeds up the process enough to move CT-based checks inline on a production line rather than confining them to offline sampling.
What's new here is that shift from CT as a forensic, sample-based tool to something fast enough to run as part of the production flow itself. Engineers who currently rely on CT for occasional root-cause investigations or first-article inspection will care about the prospect of running similar scans on a much larger share of parts without slowing the line.
Hexagon also points to uses for industrial CT beyond defect sorting, including metrology, reverse engineering, validation of additive manufacturing builds, and correlation with finite element analysis (FEA) models. The company says aerospace, automotive, and electronics manufacturers are among the earliest adopters of AI-assisted CT inspection, sectors where complex geometries and internal structures are hardest to verify with contact-based or optical methods.
The podcast did not detail specific AI models, hardware, or a product name behind these claims, and Hexagon has not published performance figures such as detection accuracy rates or throughput gains alongside them. That leaves open how much of the pitch reflects capability already shipping inside Hexagon's CT systems versus a roadmap for where the technology is headed.
