Research that took weeks now takes three minutes.

The Problem

A regulated utility's research process was entirely manual. Analysts across the regulatory team, ten or more at any given time, would navigate state public utility commission websites, scan through thousands of docketed cases to find the right one, open dozens of documents within that case, and read through hundreds of pages to locate the specific information they needed.

This wasn't occasional work. It was the foundation of how the company prepared rate case filings and responded to regulatory inquiries: the mechanisms through which the company recovers its costs and earns revenue. Slow or incomplete research meant weaker filings and potentially millions of dollars at risk.

The team had tried Microsoft Copilot. It failed in ways that would have been dangerous if the results had been submitted to a commission.

What Went Wrong with General-Purpose AI

• Wrong jurisdiction. Copilot identified an Idaho PUC case as a Washington UTC case and cited Washington statutes that had no relevance. An analyst submitting this would lose credibility with the Commission.
• Wrong case number. When asked for a company's most recent rate case, Copilot returned an outdated docket number. The correct case had been filed months earlier.
• Claimed information didn't exist when it did. On a security issuance case, Copilot said cost estimates were not disclosed in the public order. Our tool found the exact figures: $284,031.70 total, broken down by agent fees and legal fees, pulled directly from the compliance filing with page numbers.
• Fabricated rule language. Copilot quoted a state administrative rule verbatim. The quoted language does not exist. It was invented.
• Irrelevant results. When asked about utility penalty cases, Copilot returned telecom companies, recycling firms, and waste haulers. None were gas or electric utilities. Our tool returned the relevant utility cases with docket numbers, penalty amounts, and Commission reasoning.

What We Built

A research tool that pulls directly from primary state PUC filings across Washington and Idaho. The tool crawls official commission websites, pulls every docket and document within each case, and stores them in its own database. When an analyst asks a question, it searches that database as the only source of truth.

Every result cites the document name, docket number, and page number. Every citation links back to the original filing. The tool doesn't summarize what it found on the internet. It reads the actual case documents and tells you exactly where the answer came from.

The tool shows its reasoning as it works, listing the cases it found, the documents it's reading, and the research plan it's following before producing a final answer.

Results come back as a structured executive summary with inline citations linking to specific documents, followed by detailed key findings. Each claim traces back to an actual filing.

Below every answer, a full citation list shows every source document that was referenced, with docket number, filing date, company name, and the specific page numbers used.

Why It Matters

Copilot returns answers in 15–30 seconds. This tool can take 3+ minutes for a comprehensive answer. The difference is straightforward: Copilot skims the internet and summarizes. This tool reads through case documents, cross-references filings, and builds citations. That takes longer, but it's also why the output is citable and accurate.

For perspective: the research this tool does in 3 minutes would take an analyst days or weeks to do manually. Copilot is faster because it's doing less.

The Pattern

Three different organizations. Three different industries. One methodology.

Find the person losing time. Understand what's at stake. Build on primary sources and real data, not AI approximations. Deliver something that works — not a pitch deck.

That's what we do. And the regulatory team uses this tool every day.