Dunaway spent thousands of hours manually searching regulatory documents, a tedious but necessary activity to ensure project compliance.
They implemented an AI agent using Microsoft Copilot Studio and Power Platform to automate document review and provide instant, accurate answers.
The solution reduced manual research time by 90%, improved compliance, and reclaimed time to be focused on advancing project timelines and providing excellent service to their clients.
Dunaway—a multi-discipline design, planning, and engineering firm—spent over 10,000 hours a year viewing, searching, and interpreting regulatory documents. To simplify and automate this process for engineers, Dunaway introduced an AI agent powered by Microsoft Copilot Studio along with Microsoft Power Automate to prepare and update the information the agent relies on.
This automated document review solution has significantly reduced manual effort, improved accuracy, ensured compliance, and boosted productivity for engineers.
“We get feedback from our beta testers, and we can go fix it in the next hour and then publish it. The rapid prototyping has been the key for me as far as Copilot Studio goes.”
Brian Bowden, Vice President of Technology, Dunaway
Manual research time cut by 90%
Founded in 1956, Dunaway is a Texas-based multi-discipline design, planning, and engineering firm with a strong 70-year legacy and a bold vision for the future. With 375 employees in eight office locations, Dunaway operates across the state and beyond, serving over 100 cities in Texas and handling projects in over 40 states nationwide. Their multidisciplinary expertise spans Survey, Civil and Structural Engineering, Planning and Landscape Architecture, Construction Inspection Services (CIS), and Environmental and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), in addition to SUE (Subsurface Utility Engineering) and ROW (Right-of-Way) services, positioning the company as a leader in its field.
For Dunaway, navigating regulatory complexity was a major challenge. Each week, civil engineers spent hours manually searching and deciphering regulatory documents from more than 50 cities in Texas.
Before embracing Microsoft solutions, the company’s engineers faced the sheer volume and complexity of city, county, and state codes. Each jurisdiction maintained its own requirements, and codes changed frequently. Engineers had to manually search websites or outdated PDFs stored on company servers, often spending valuable time searching through thousands of pages of documents.
“Our most valuable people were spending their time flipping through PDFs,” says Brian Bowden, Vice President of Technology at Dunaway.
This inefficiency cost the company over 10,000 hours annually, equating to saving many of their engineers 5% of their yearly time that can now be spent on better serving their clients. The process was not only time-consuming but also risked creating delays across multiple rounds of review. “Due to the complexity of the codes we work with, it requires extensive internal QA/QC. With this agent in the hands of our engineers, our internal review process can focus on more critical design related items,” Bowden says.
The lack of a single source of truth and the difficulty of keeping up with ever-changing regulations created frustration. As Logan Welsh, a graduate engineer working on innovation initiatives at Dunaway, says, “Our work often touches multiple manuals that are each 500 pages or more. Trying to jump across all of them at the same time to ensure compliance is tedious.”
Recognizing the need for change, Dunaway’s leadership explored new technology solutions. The breakthrough came with Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio.
“We saw the opportunity of all the different things that Power Platform offers. It fits perfectly into what we want to do and makes it very easy to roll out solutions to all our employees,” says Bowden.
With the help of consulting firm MicroAge, Dunaway completed an intensive two-month crash course in Power Platform and Copilot Studio. Soon after, the team participated in an Microsoft Build-A-Thon, an event where teams can build custom agents using Copilot Studio. “We already had the idea for an agent that automates research, and the event gave us a deadline to finish it,” Bowden recalls. “The event allowed us to apply some of what we had learned, while tackling the big challenge of our engineers spending too much of their time searching through thousands of pages of codes. Seeing what other participating teams in the Build-A-Thon built was impressive, and it gave us ideas for the future.”
During the Build-A-Thon, Dunaway designed and presented an agent prototype to collect and organize city, county, and state codes across Texas. The goal: reduce hours of manual research time by enabling engineers to access city-specific codes through natural language queries.
The biggest challenge during the Build-A-Thon was collecting and ingesting all the data into Copilot Studio. Welsh led the effort by creating a manifest based on input from internal subject matter experts, a simple Excel file listing all the documents and their metadata. Using Power Automate, the team built a cloud flow to pull the latest information weekly and upload it directly into the agent.
The process begins with the Excel manifest that lists required regulatory documents from each city and their sources. Power Automate scrapes and collects these documents from both static and dynamic sources using the manifest, stores them in SharePoint, and then automatically uploads and organizes them in a Dataverse table that is natively used by Copilot Studio. Copilot Studio is customized to provide generative AI-powered answers, direct citations to source documents, and escalation features for subject matter expert review. Instead of spending hours searching websites and databases, engineers now simply type a query into the agent to get answers immediately.
The system is hands-off, accurate, and easily updatable, running weekly to ensure current information. Welsh also implemented a mechanism to separate knowledge by city, preventing “knowledge bleeding” between jurisdictions.
The ability to rapidly prototype, customize, and iterate solutions has been key in enabling speed, accuracy, and compliance. “We get feedback from our beta testers, and we can go fix it in the next hour and then publish it. The rapid prototyping has been the key for me as far as Copilot Studio goes,” says Bowden.
“Our time spent asking questions against city codes is decreasing by 90% or more,” Welsh says. “That means we can do a lot more internal checks before making a submission to a city, which also shortens our review process.”
The agent’s ability to provide direct citations and take users to the exact page needed has been a game-changer. “The speed to getting the answer was the end goal of creating the bot—access to knowledge,” Bowden says. “Previously, if a client had a question in a meeting, our engineers would have to say, ‘We’ll look into that and get back to you.’ Now, they’re be able to query the bot in a meeting and answer the client’s question immediately.” Beyond saving time, the solution improves accuracy and compliance with municipal regulations across 50 different cities in Texas by ensuring fewer instances of referencing outdated or incorrect codes, reducing liability, and increasing responsiveness to clients.
“Having a single source of truth really cuts down on liability,” Bowden says. “We’re telling the company, these are the codes you’re going to use, and we guarantee that they are correct and verified by our subject matter experts.”
“Our time spent asking questions against city codes is decreasing by 90% or more. That means we can do a lot more internal checks before making a submission to a city, which also shortens our review process.”
Logan Welsh, Graduate Engineer, Dunaway
Building on the initial success with AI, Dunaway launched “DAVE,” the Dunaway AI virtual expert—a company-wide conversational agent that combines HR, IT, and accounting functions. Employees can now get answers, fill out forms, and submit support requests in one place.
The rollout included creative engagement, such as a company-wide mascot competition that encouraged even the most AI-averse employees to participate. Live, virtual training for all employees ensured high adoption and effective use. Employees have already embraced Dave, viewing the tool as a colleague. “We wanted to make the AI agent a team member, and part of the company,” says Bowden. “Everyone has bought into that concept. In meetings, people ask, ‘Can DAVE do this?’”
Dunaway plans to expand its agent capabilities, including tools that automatically check drawings against city codes for QA/QC assistance. “Using Copilot Studio allowed us to develop solution patterns in-house,” Welsh explains. “We’re not just building solutions, we’re building skills to keep finding processes to automate. Our goal is to stay agile and these tools make that possible.”
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