The Challenge
Xcel Energy's Contractor Management Team facilitates the onboarding of hundreds of external consultants every quarter, a high-volume process involving new hire consultants, consulting firm managers, and Xcel Energy supervisors across multiple workstreams. Without any self-service access to onboarding data, every question, status check, or issue required a direct email to CMT. The resulting volume of routine inquiries created persistent delays, increased the risk of missed onboarding steps, and left managers and supervisors with no visibility into bottlenecks or emerging issue patterns. CMT staff bore the cost of each inquiry individually, with no scalable path to resolution.
The Solution
Motive Power designed and deployed Olaf, a structured Copilot Agent built in Microsoft Copilot Studio and connected directly to CMT’s internal database.
Rather than relying on open-ended generative AI, Olaf uses pre-built topic flows to guide users through their questions — significantly reducing hallucination risk, keeping interactions focused, and delivering accurate responses without requiring CMT involvement for routine inquiries.
Its knowledge base incorporates CMT Lifecycle Definitions and FAQs to further inform its responses.
When issues do require human follow-up, Olaf automatically drafts issue-specific escalation emails to CMT on the user’s behalf.
The solution serves three distinct stakeholder groups: new hire consultants receive immediate clarity on onboarding progress and required next steps; consulting firm managers gain real-time status updates and faster visibility into issue patterns across multiple hires; and Xcel Energy supervisors benefit from improved insight into onboarding bottlenecks and key completion dates that affect project planning.
Key Metrics
The Results
Routine CMT email volume related to onboarding status and common issues is anticipated to decrease significantly, with resolution times for new hire questions dropping from hours to seconds.
Proactive guidance through structured flows is expected to improve onboarding completion rates.
Real-time database access gives managers and supervisors visibility they previously had to request manually.
Collectively, these improvements reduce the risk of onboarding delays cascading into project delivery disruptions.
