Energy Conservations Platform Harnesses GenAI and IDP to Triple Utility Bill Processing Efficiency, Accelerating Energy Savings

It all started with the founder served on a Texas school board and solved the district’s budgetary shortfall by inventing the nation’s first utility savings program. In just one year, the district was able to absorb a 67% increase in air conditioning load and still see a year-over-year decrease to its electricity expense. That was the first step in their journey to help clients create a positive impact in sustainability, but the was just the beginning.

The company wanted to leverage AI for automating the data capture from client utility bills through Intelligent Document Processing enhanced with GenAI. Their goal was to streamline the onboarding process for new clients, enhance overall accuracy and reliability of utility bill entry, boost clients' trust in data, and promptly identify areas for energy savings upon bill reception. Ultimately, this initiative will help decrease their current costs and allow energy consultants to allocate more time to client interactions instead of bill data entry.

Due to high demand and new customer onboarding pressure, the platform processes an increasing number of bills every day, and the manual process they were using inhibited their ability to scale and rapidly provide analysis and cost savings to their customers. Primary areas of friction included the onboarding process for new clients, time spent by energy consultants doing data entry vs. focusing on analysis, and overall accuracy and reliability.

To achieve the growth and customer satisfaction they desired, the platform needed to transition from a manual, human-entry oriented workflow to a fully automated pipeline that would scale to accommodate a growing input of data. This would decrease costs associated with bill entry and result in faster turnaround of cost savings for their customers.

Recognizing the need for a modern cloud-based solution that is both cost effective and highly accurate, Our client partnered with Protagona to develop a GenAI-enabled pipeline that enables the scanning, extraction, and analysis of a near infinite number of energy bills. Utilizing AWS Bedrock (with Claude 3) for GenAI and Amazon Textract + AWS Lambda for Intelligent Data processing enabled the platform to harness the latest wave of GenAI advancements at scale and with cost efficiency. 

The collaboration with Protagona resulted in a comprehensive re-architecting of the platform, transforming it from a tedious, manual process into an efficient, fully automated pipeline. This innovation dramatically reduces manual labor, shifting from cumbersome data entry to swift validation by a dedicated worker, ensuring seamless and rapid processing.Ultimately they are now able to respond and scale to n-number of customers with a lower error rate and incredible efficiency.