A boutique carbon consultancy spent one to three hours matching each client report by hand. An AI agent now does the first pass, and the work is halved.
Rawstone Consulting measures carbon footprints for businesses. Every client sends a spending report, and every line has to be matched to the right carbon category before the emissions can be worked out.
Clients and scientists rarely use the same words. What one company calls “bookkeeping assurance”, the carbon data calls “accounting”. Some reports run to hundreds of lines, and each one took a skilled consultant one to three hours.
Rawstone is a boutique team of four. Outside consultants with the right technical skills are hard to find, so this one task held back how much work they could take on.
“We were basically limited in our ability to use external consultants for this task.”
Caroline Johnstone, Rawstone Consulting
02What we built
An AI agent that does the first pass.
We built an AI agent that does the first pass. Paste in a client’s spending report and press run.
How the agent works
1 / 6Hundreds of lines
Every line matched by handPaste the report, press runA category and a confidence scoreThree options and a reason whyUnsure lines are flaggedThe consultant makes the call
Every line comes back with a carbon category, a confidence score, three alternatives and a short reason why. Anything it’s unsure about is flagged, and Rawstone’s consultants make the final call.
03What changed
Half the time. None of the expertise lost.
89%first-pass accuracy against Rawstone’s expert analysts
In Caroline’s words, the work is now halved, not taken away. And that turned out to be the point.
“Why I say it’s halved and not fully taken is actually what it reaffirmed really was that we actually do a technical and very skilled job.”
Caroline Johnstone, Rawstone Consulting
The team came away more confident in their own expertise: the agent does the heavy lifting, and they bring the judgement their clients pay for.
"It has obviously saved time. So we probably halved the time it's taken for that particular task."
By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information.
