How a Leading Engineering Firm Cut Staffing Cycles by 90% and Proposal Drafting Time by 40% with StackAI

How a Leading Engineering Firm Cut Staffing Cycles by 90% and Proposal Drafting Time by 40% with StackAI

Discover how one of America’s leading infrastructure firms used AI agents to reduce staffing from days to minutes, boost proposal win rates, and streamline HR support.

Client

Top Engineering Firm

Challenge

Manual staffing, proposal drafting, and HR support processes were slow, error-prone, and consumed thousands of hours across hundreds of projects each year.

Solution

By deploying secure AI agents, the firm reduced staffing cycles from days to minutes, cut proposal drafting time by 40%, and automated up to 40% of routine HR queries.

Overview

Founded over a century ago, this leading American infrastructure and engineering firm supports complex transportation, energy, and urban development projects nationwide. With thousands of employees spread across dozens of offices, the company is known for its deep expertise in planning, design, and delivery of major public and private works.

But as the scale of projects grew, so did the complexity of internal operations. Matching staff with the right experience to new projects, reviewing past proposals for best practices, and answering internal HR questions all required countless hours of manual effort. That’s when the company turned to StackAI.

A technology leader within the firm recognized the potential for AI to reduce bottlenecks and improve decision-making. StackAI stood out because it combined enterprise-grade security with no-code usability, allowing teams to move from pilot to production quickly and securely. They first began experimenting with internal AI chatbots—essentially private, enterprise-secure versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity—built to answer staff questions and reduce repetitive knowledge lookups across the firm, but soon moved on to a diverse set of other use cases, helping impact:

Staffing efficiency: Reduced staffing cycles from 2–3 days to under 30 minutes, saving thousands of managerial hours annually across 400+ projects
Proposal development: Cut proposal drafting and research time by 40%, with projected 10–15% increase in win rates on competitive bids
HR support: AI agents now handle 30–40% of routine employee queries, freeing up 3–4 FTE hours per day
Enterprise impact: Faster project staffing, smarter bids, and streamlined HR support collectively boost project delivery speed, employee productivity, and client satisfaction

Smarter Project Staffing

The Problem: Inefficient, Manual Staffing Process

When a new project was awarded, managers often had to manually call around offices across the country to find staff with relevant experience. For example, identifying engineers who had worked on “Project #24578” could take days, with emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls needed to confirm availability and fit.

The Solution: Resume-Based Staffing Agent

Using StackAI, the firm built an AI agent trained on thousands of employee resumes and project records. With a simple query, managers can now instantly see who has relevant experience, certifications, and availability. What once required dozens of manual calls is now accomplished in minutes, helping the firm staff projects faster and with greater accuracy. Staffing cycles that once took days now take under 30 minutes. With more than 400 major projects staffed each year, the savings translate to thousands of managerial hours reclaimed annually.

Proposal Intelligence

The Problem: Reinventing the Wheel on Every Proposal

Proposal teams lacked a systematic way to learn from past submissions. Successful proposals lived in isolated folders, while losing bids rarely informed future efforts. This made it difficult to identify patterns of what worked and what didn’t.

The Solution: Automated Contract Parsing

Two proposal-focused agents were deployed:

Internal Proposal Reference Agent: Surfaces insights from past successful and unsuccessful proposals, guiding teams as they draft new submissions.

Competitor Proposal Reference Agent: Reviews competitor bids that outperformed the firm’s, highlighting differentiators that can be addressed in current work.

Together, these agents ensure that every proposal benefits from institutional memory, reducing repetition and increasing win rates.

“The most rewarding part was watching proposal teams change their process overnight: instead of hunting for hours for past documents, they get targeted insights and draft recommendations in minutes.”

Max Poff
Forward Deployed Engineer

HR Policy Support

The Problem: Policy Questions That Slow Down Teams

Employees often had simple but time-sensitive questions like “What’s our parental leave policy?” or “How do I submit continuing education expenses?” Answers were buried in policy manuals, requiring HR staff to field repetitive requests.

The Solution: HR Policy Chatbot Agent

With StackAI, HR rolled out a suite of agents trained on company policy documents. Employees can now ask questions directly and receive instant, accurate responses—freeing HR teams to focus on more strategic priorities while ensuring consistent communication. HR estimates that 30–40% of inbound queries are now handled by AI, saving the equivalent of 3–4 full-time staff hours per day across the organization.

Conclusion

By starting with project staffing and expanding into proposals and HR, the firm has shown how AI agents can transform everyday workflows. Tasks that once took days now take minutes. Insights that were siloed are now instantly accessible.

The result is faster staffing, smarter proposals, and more empowered employees across the organization. With StackAI, this industry leader is building a future where AI agents enhance expertise, accelerate decision-making, and help deliver infrastructure projects that shape communities across the country. Want to see how StackAI can do the same for your enterprise? Get a demo here.

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