Reference architecture
Discipline: AI / ML
Industry: Engineering and construction
Technology: Agentic AI
Cloud: Microsoft Azure
Region: Illustrative
Specification review effort reduced substantially with human sign-off retained
Reference architecture
Agentic document review for an engineering consultancy
An engineering consultancy compared thousands of specification pages against project standards before every tender, entirely by hand.
Conceptual visualization only
Engagement at a glance
Objectives
- Cut review effort on repetitive specification comparison
- Retain engineer sign-off on every finding before it leaves the firm
- Keep an audit trail suitable for client and legal review
Data sources
- Permissioned specification and drawing repositories
- Internal project standards and clause libraries
- Historical review comments used as evaluation examples
Architecture and approach
Retrieval over permissioned document stores, tool-using agent with mandatory human approval, full audit trail.
Step 1
Ingestion
Documents parsed with layout awareness so clauses and tables stay intact.
Step 2
Retrieval
Clause-level retrieval restricted to the projects a reviewer may access.
Step 3
Comparison
Agent drafts deviations with citations; no finding is asserted without a source.
Step 4
Approval
Engineers accept, edit or reject each finding; rejections feed evaluation.
Step 5
Reporting
Approved findings exported as a review pack with references.
Technologies used
- Retrieval over chunked documents with clause-level citations
- Tool-using agent with mandatory human approval gates
- Azure hosting with private networking
- Structured findings store with reviewer decisions
Security and governance
- Document-level permissions enforced before retrieval, not after
- No client content used for model training
- Every agent action, approval and rejection recorded with user and timestamp
Output
Reported against the objectives set out for this reference architecture.
Review effort
Substantially reduced
Reviewers confirm drafted findings instead of reading everything.
Human sign-off
Required on 100%
No output reaches a client without engineer approval.
Citation coverage
Every finding
Each deviation links to the exact clause.
Lessons learned
- Rejected drafts were the most valuable evaluation signal in the whole system.
- Approval gates increased adoption; reviewers trusted a tool they controlled.
Reference architecture illustrating method and architecture only. It is not a verified client project, and no client commissioned it.
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