We built new AI features into 365 Requirements Portal. Here's the thinking behind it.

Disclosure: I work for Altium on the team building Requirements Portal, part of Altium 365.

If you're already using Altium, you may have heard of Requirements Portal, our cloud tool for managing engineering requirements and verification.

We've just launched Agentic AI for Requirements, and I wanted to explain what it is, especially for anyone who sees "AI" in a requirements tool and immediately gets nervous. That reaction is fair, so let me be clear about the boundaries first.

What it will never do: it doesn't act on its own, it doesn't change anything in your project without you approving it, and it doesn't replace the person responsible for requirements. There's no autonomous agent editing your spec behind your back. The principle we built everything on is simple: AI proposes, you decide.

What it's actually for is the tedious part of the job:

- Cleaning up the busywork: drafting or restructuring requirements from docs you already have (a PDF, a spreadsheet, an email thread) so you're not retyping everything by hand. You review what it produces before anything sticks.

- Catching review errors: surfacing gaps, inconsistencies, or missing traceability links, so errors get caught early.

- Reusing your team's standards: you can define how your team writes or checks requirements once, and apply it consistently, rather than re-explaining it every time.

Everything is a suggestion you approve or reject. The engineer stays in the loop on every change, while the AI just does the grunt work that usually eats the time.

Genuinely curious how this community feels about it:

- is the busywork (writing up requirements, keeping them consistent, checking traceability) the part you'd actually want help with? Or is there something else that's more painful?

- Where's the line for you: what would you want AI to help with, and what would you never want it touching?

Happy to answer anything about what we've built and why.