AES cuts a 14-day safety audit to one hour with a three-layer agent system
The power company put roughly 1,500 annual safety audits onto Claude agents via Google Cloud, keeping a human in the loop, and reports audit time falling from 14 days to one hour.
AES runs about 1,500 safety-program audits a year, and each one used to consume roughly 100 employee hours of document review. It built a three-layer agent system, with separate agents for document processing, task breakdown and report generation, on Claude models via Google Cloud's agent platform, keeping a human reviewer on every audit. Published outcomes: audit time from 14 days to one hour, a vendor-cited 99% cost reduction, a 10 to 20% accuracy gain, and doubled annual audit capacity with agents handling half the workload. The lesson for a smaller team is that the win came from redesigning one repetitive, document-heavy workflow rather than deploying a general assistant. This was a managed-onramp path, using Claude on Google Cloud rather than a from-scratch build.