Sift Introduces AI Agents Built for Hardware Engineering

Sift Agents investigates test, flight, and production telemetry inside customers' environments and turns findings into reusable rules and reports

MARINA DEL REY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sift, the end-to-end platform for teams building advanced hardware, today introduced Sift Agents, an AI agent that investigates test, flight, and production telemetry inside a customer's Sift environment and turns its findings into reusable rules and reports. The feature opens its research preview today with engineers at existing Sift customers.

Sift Agents draws on a program's assets, runs, channels, and rules to investigate anomalies, generate insights, and then save its findings back into Sift for engineering teams to reuse as a durable artifact. Because data does not leave the platform, Sift Agents supports programs that cannot route telemetry to an outside agent, including export-controlled work on Sift's GovCloud deployment. The agent inherits existing user permissions and requires human approval before making changes.

Hardware engineering teams generate sensor data faster than they can review it. Test, flight, and production programs process data from millions of concurrent sensors, but investigating that data remains largely manual. Many investigations never reach a root cause because ruling out every candidate failure model would take weeks of manual work.

"Hardware teams have more data than engineers, and every test widens the gap," said Austin Spiegel, Co-Founder and CEO of Sift. "They need an agent that already knows their machines, their channels, and their rules, and that works inside the platform their program already trusts."

Engineers can also use Sift MCP to connect AI tools directly to Sift through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard. The MCP is model-agnostic, allowing engineers to use their preferred platform, including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and others. Sift MCP is available to all Sift customers at no additional cost, with the server running on the engineer's machine under their own API key and permissions.

Plantd, a manufacturer of carbon-negative building materials, uses Sift as its production telemetry system. A post-test investigation that previously required approximately 40 hours of manually exporting channels and rebuilding statistics, graphs, and written reviews can now be completed in an afternoon using Sift MCP.

"When it took me half a day to get an answer, I only asked the questions that were worth half a day," said Matthew Barr, Process Engineer at Plantd. "Now if I want the median instead of the average, or I want to throw out the startup transient, it's one sentence. So I end up with better answers, not just faster ones."

The Sift Agents research preview starts with selected engineers at existing Sift customers and will expand to additional organizations this fall. Engineering teams can apply for early access at siftstack.com/ai. Sift MCP setup guides are available at docs.siftstack.com.

About Sift:

Sift is the fastest path from prototype to ops. The end-to-end platform for teams building advanced hardware, Sift brings every sensor into one place, turns raw data into decisions the same day, and scales from first test to operations. Founded by former SpaceX engineers, Sift serves teams across aerospace, defense, and robotics and is headquartered in Los Angeles with an office in San Francisco. Learn more at www.siftstack.com.