{"slug":"hawaiian-electric-builds-a-rag-chatbot-on-databricks-to-answer-regulatory-compliance-queries-in-seconds","url":"https://findausecase.com/use-cases/hawaiian-electric-builds-a-rag-chatbot-on-databricks-to-answer-regulatory-compliance-queries-in-seconds","title":"Hawaiian Electric builds a RAG chatbot on Databricks to answer regulatory compliance queries in seconds","description":"Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) worked with Databricks Professional Services to build a retrieval augmented generation proof of concept using Databricks AI Search and a RAG model-serving endpoint, letting its regulatory team query extensive regulatory documentation through a conversational chatbot instead of manually reading full texts. The implementation took two weeks to go from zero to a working RAG system and cut the time to answer a single regulatory query from about five minutes to five seconds.","company":"Hawaiian Electric Company","industry":"Energy","aiCapabilities":["Retrieval-Augmented Generation","Conversational AI"],"technology":["Databricks AI Search","Spark Declarative Pipelines","Unity Catalog","Databricks Model Serving","Agent Bricks"],"deployment":"Public Cloud","problemStatement":"HECO's regulatory team had to manually sift through a vast trove of regulatory documentation, searching for relevant documents and reading through entire texts to answer information requests, a repetitive and time-consuming process that hindered the team's ability to respond quickly and at scale.","solutionApproach":"HECO partnered with Databricks Professional Services to build a RAG model proof of concept, setting up a model-serving endpoint for querying regulatory documents, a Databricks Notebook interface for iterative query refinement, and Databricks AI Search with automatically generated Spark Declarative Pipelines to ingest preprocessed data into a vector database, with Unity Catalog securing non-public documents.","businessValue":"The RAG proof of concept was implemented in two weeks and reduced the time to answer a single regulatory query from about five minutes to five seconds, improving both efficiency and the accuracy and reliability of the information retrieved, with HECO planning to scale the chatbot to other departments.","evidence":{"band":"high"},"sourceUrl":"https://www.databricks.com/customers/hawaiian-electric-company","dates":{"publishedAt":"2026-09-23T05:49:01.185Z","publishedAtSource":"pipeline","updatedAt":"2026-09-23T05:49:01.185Z"},"license":"Open for reading and citing with a link to https://findausecase.com/use-cases/hawaiian-electric-builds-a-rag-chatbot-on-databricks-to-answer-regulatory-compliance-queries-in-seconds. Bulk republication requires permission."}