I've been a Mechanical Engineer for a similar length of time, using Solidworks and Creo, and I concur. I've released many thousands of parts over the course of my career, and I don't think of the modeling itself as a major time sink (provided you have some decent training, and are using a thoughtful approach and not fighting the software). If the AI copilot could actually do all the modeling based on prompts, that would be pretty interesting, especially if it could create a feature try that I could tweak.

Automatic drafting is something that I think might be a good target for doing some AI research on. Your prompt exists in the form of the solid model, and it's feature tree and parameters. The output is the lay out views and annotations. It's okay if the output isn't perfect, as I would expect to be reviewing it and doing some tweaks.

Helping with all of the ERP processes involved with releasing and maintaining engineering documentation would be a HUGE time saver. If I could ask a copilot program to start a change request, and give it some basic descriptions of what I'm changing, it would be massively helpful if it could start pulling relevant files, and auto-filling the right requests/forms/whatever to do that process.