Frontline Safety and Field Knowledge Agent: 4-Week PoV

Power Utilities industry face a looming loss of institutional knowledge as up to 40% of the frontline workforce nears retirement, while procedures sit scattered across scanned PDFs and competing versions that keyword search can't reliably answer.

MAQ Software delivers a working, agent-driven assistant grounded in your approved procedure library and surfaced in Microsoft Teams on mobile, covering field procedure lookup and pre-job hazard briefing on one shared Microsoft Azure foundation with a human in the approval path.

Business Challenge

• With 40% of the utility workforce nearing retirement by 2030, frontline execution can no longer rely on tribal knowledge.
• Procedures sit in scanned PDFs and competing versions, so lookup is slow and briefings vary by crew and region.
• Keyword search fails because crews ask in operational language and answers must cite an approved source.

Key Questions

• Can a crew member get a correct, source-cited procedure answer on mobile in under a minute?
• How consistent are pre-job safety briefings across crews, regions, and contractors?
• What approval controls sit between a generated answer and a field decision?

Strategy

Week 1:

• Conduct workshops with Field Operations, Safety, and IT.
• Select two work types and corpus assessment.
• Ingest using Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence.

Week 2:

• Build Field Procedure and Knowledge Agent, grounding retrieval in Microsoft Azure AI Search.
• Orchestrate in Microsoft Azure AI Foundry with retrieval, citation, and refusal behavior via Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Week 3:

• Build Job Hazard and Pre-Job Briefing Assistant on the same foundation, with mandatory sign-off.
• Deploy to Microsoft Teams mobile.
• Evaluate with Safety and field SMEs.

Week 4:

• Test accuracy and citations, then refine and validate boundaries.
• Deliver an executive readout with results, limitations, and roadmap.

Deliverables

• Working agent in Microsoft Teams for two selected work types
• Accuracy and citation evaluation against an SME-defined question set
• Deployed Microsoft Azure reference architecture in your tenant
• Ingestion and retrieval pipeline with versioning

Target Audience

• Field Crew Leads
• Line Technicians
• Safety Coordinators
• Job Briefing Owners

Business Outcomes

• Faster procedure lookup in the field, reducing delays and rework
• More consistent safety briefings across crews and regions
• Institutional knowledge captured before it retires
• Traceable, auditable answers that stand up to regulatory review

Prerequisites

• Microsoft Azure subscription with contributor access
• 200 to 300 approved procedure documents for two work types, with a named owner.
• Access to your Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams for the development and testing.

Why MAQ Software

• Proven expertise building retrieval and knowledge agents for power and utility field operations teams.
• Deep experience in building agents around work order types, permit requirements, and job hazard analysis.

Call To Action

• Reach out to CustomerSuccess@maqsoftware.com