Picture, if you will, a US-focused senior consultant at a global professional services firm. You are one of as many as 100,000 staff in your market, part of a multi-billion dollar business line, tasked with parsing complexity for clients, and creating a path forward. For the sake of storytelling, let’s call you Nate Bateleur. 

Power utilities are your thing, and after a decade-plus in the job, your specialty is moving rapidly to understand a new body of information on behalf of your clients. That information could be something as simple as a new utility service contract that lends itself well to a quick turnaround, or it could be as complex as an integrated resource plan that requires a multi-month workflow.

Your job is not unique, and neither are your tasks. But, the asks that clients bring to you feel like they are entirely your (and your team’s) own. Similarly, your service — and the value that you and your team bring, on the best days — can feel unique too.  

As you know, professional services jobs never really finish. Put another way: your job is questions all the way down, and questions are eternal. Not only do standard questions recur in a changing macroeconomic and technological environment, but new questions also emerge frequently. Oftentimes, the answers to these new questions live outside your existing institutional knowledge base. Most consulting workflows combine both question types, and your job is to gracefully balance thoroughness and thoughtfulness with speed and flexibility.  

And here’s what that looks like: you wake up at 5:55am in California, and your team lead Bryce Falconi, based in Boulder, Colorado is already awake and firing off emails. Just yesterday, Colorado's largest utility filed its 2025-2029 distribution system plan…all 677 pages of it. Bryce is not the most loquacious person via email…the message is just a hyperlink and below that says, simply:

have 
fu :)

(It’s probably “have fun” but you aren’t quite sure.)

As luck would have it, the very next email in your inbox is from Halcyon, where you’ve configured a series of alerts for documents just like this (distribution system plans) in states that your clients care about (the Plains and Inter-mountain West) and for entities that are already in your portfolio (the biggest public companies — you don’t deal much with municipal utilities or electric cooperatives at the moment, though you expect that to change). 

Halcyon Alerts are free, sign-up here

There, right below the subject line, is what you need to start your workflow: the document in the context of a larger Colorado Public Utilities Commission docket 24A-0547E, including the documents that came before it and those that will come after it. This docket profile is dynamic: the top level has an AI-powered summary of key parties, arguments, statements, relevant financial figures, and timeline. Just as importantly, the same generation extends to every document in the docket, and updates constantly. 

Docket profiles are free and can be accessed via Halcyon Alerts and Docket Search page

Thanks to the at-a-glance information collated into the docket summaries, you’re at the start of a meaningful workflow — which you initiate by sending the Docket profile right back to Bryce. (Because you forwarded the email to Bryce, Bryce doesn’t have an account, but thanks to Halcyon’s streamlined authentication process, he creates one in less than two minutes. Bryce biases for simplicity, so you make sure to pre-empt him: “Yes, you have to authenticate so they know you’re a real person, it’s a free service and this takes two clicks, please do it.”) 

Coffee time for you — but after that, and 10 minutes of chatting with Bryce, you’re into your own pre-empt: you know what your clients are going to ask you about this 677 page document, so you might as well get into it straightaway and reach out to Halcyon’s Helpdesk, its managed service that uses AI to help answer complex questions quickly. Even though you can use Halcyon yourself, Helpdesk’s capability extends your team’s capacity significantly, which is crucial given the breadth of your clients' use cases:

One of your new clients is a major developer of battery energy storage assets. You know already that she will be curious to know just what provisions are set out for batteries within the distribution plan, in which locations, on which timelines, and in which volumes. That’s a great ‘vertical’ request for Halcyon Helpdesk: going very deep into a giant document with a set of data science-driven questions and a structured output. 

Your most established client is a Canadian pension fund with heavy exposure to US energy and infrastructure.  You know that it needs to know about every potential dollar that can be invested as part of this plan and how it might increase the utility’s rate base and whether or not there are any differentials in its return on equity for building different parts of the new asset base.  But, you also know that this will be a high-level request at first, and comparative too — to what the other neighboring and regional utilities are doing. That’s a ‘horizontal’ request for Halcyon Helpdesk — getting a clear view on one entity, but then comparing it to other similar ones outside the bounds of this particular proceeding. 

Finally you’ve got a new client, a multi-strategy equities fund, that is exploring a thesis on hardware investment in distribution grids: transformers, switchgear, advanced monitoring systems, right down to the volume of copper wire that will be needed.  That’s something you and Halcyon can get in front of: asking a bunch of quantified questions about specific locations where things might be built, or what contracts will need to be signed for hardware.  You think of this as a horizontal question within a vertical one:  asking the same question of different subsectors in the same way — and not compared, yet, to another domain but ready for comparison if needed. 

After a few days of iteration, you’re feeling good about your work for the week.  You’ve gone deeper and broader into key inquiries for multiple clients in multiple ways. You’ve done it faster than you possibly could have on your own or even with your team: an AI-powered solution using an authoritative, organized catalog of relevant regulatory documents means that what would take weeks for your team took only hours with Halcyon.  

###

Bryce and Nate have hard jobs. They live in a world where "have fu" isn't just a typo in an early morning email – it's an ironic reminder that parsing through 677-page regulatory documents is someone's idea of fun. Fortunately, at Halcyon, it’s our idea of fun too. 

We’re working hard to build a platform that can improve your productivity and help you extract structured insights before your coffee gets cold. And while it won’t stop you from having to wake up on Friday morning at five-fifty-five or fix ambiguous typos, we think it will make your (and your team’s) life easier. If this sounds like you, drop us a line at sayhi@halcyon.eco

Comments or questions? We’d love to hear from you - sayhi@halcyon.eco, or find us on LinkedIn and Twitter