Why we’re building an operations system, not a chatbot.

There are roughly a thousand UK consultancies designing substations between 11 kV and 400 kV. We talk to maybe a hundred of them. Every one of them has the same problem, and not one of them has named it the same way.

The problem is not engineering capacity. There are enough chartered engineers in the country to do the work. The problem is everything else around the engineering: the RFI on Monday morning that needs a quotation back by Wednesday, the RAMS template that hasn’t been updated since the last revision of the wiring regulations, the spreadsheet of NERS passport expiry dates that lives in someone’s OneDrive, the receipt from Screwfix that should have been captured for R&D tax credits but wasn’t. The admin is the bottleneck.

We have spent two years inside Saqib Engineering looking at this. Most of the products that arrived to “solve” it were, generously, chatbots — a text box on top of a language model, with a workflow drawn around it in marketing.

That’s not what the work needs. The work needs an operating system.

Six specialist agents. One per discipline. They run inside the trust boundary of your Microsoft 365 tenant. Each one owns its corner of the practice end-to-end: Emma the inbox, Sarah the document register, James the NEC4 contract, Robert the calculations, Michael the money, Paul the people. The engineering judgement still sits with you — you keep the three-button approval flow — but the recurring work is gone.

This is the first essay of many. We’ll write more about the architectural decisions (why we picked Astro for this site, why we run agents inside the customer tenant rather than ours, why we refuse to log raw prompts), the engineering decisions (clause-by-clause referencing of BS 7671 and IEC 60909 because pattern-matching from general knowledge is forbidden in this industry), and the messy operational decisions (how to onboard a fellow consultancy without disrupting your own practice).

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