How Hawaiian Electric Uses Databricks Agent Bricks to Accelerate Regulatory Document Retrieval

Hawaiian Electric operates a complex regulatory environment, managing compliance documentation, operating procedures, and engineering standards across tens of thousands of files accumulated over decades of utility operations. For a company serving 95% of Hawaii's population, accurate and fast access to regulatory information isn't a convenience — it determines how quickly engineers can resolve compliance questions, make operational decisions, and respond to grid events.

The challenge was fundamental: the company's document library had grown to over 60,000 regulatory files, making manual search increasingly impractical. Engineers and analysts spending hours tracing through documents to find applicable standards or procedures was a direct drag on productivity and decision speed. Existing keyword search tools returned too much noise and too little precision.

Hawaiian Electric selected Databricks Agent Bricks to build a Knowledge Assistant that uses AI to search and retrieve answers from its regulatory document corpus. The system was built on Databricks' unified data and AI platform, with Unity Catalog providing governed access to the document index. Agent Bricks enabled the team to create an agentic retrieval workflow that understands the intent of natural language queries and surfaces the most relevant regulatory content with source attribution.

The operational results validated the approach immediately. Retrieval accuracy improved from 30% to 85% — a nearly 3x improvement in answer quality. Response times dropped to 3x faster than previous methods, compressing hours of manual search into minutes. The Knowledge Assistant is now used across the engineering and operations organization to accelerate compliance review and reduce the time engineers spend hunting for procedural guidance.

For Hawaiian Electric, the deployment represents a broader shift toward AI-assisted regulatory work at a utility where the volume and complexity of compliance documentation had outpaced manual navigation. The company is continuing to expand the system's coverage and exploring additional agentic workflows powered by Databricks.