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A retrieval engine that sits beside the existing system, reads what it already produces, and closes customer support. Aimed at utilities ops teams, so the work stops following people home.
In short: Support Agent for Utilities, Run by Retrieval is a retrieval engine aimed at utilities ops managers, covering customer support. It scores 78/100 on AltF Ideas, carried by moat (97) and held back by demand (60). Typical pricing is $8.9k–$89k per customer per year, with a first version reachable in about a quarter for $16k–$36k.
Utilities teams lose the same forty questions answered by a human every day. A typical utilities operation runs this on people, memory, and a shared spreadsheet. The cost is invisible on any P&L line, which is why it never gets fixed.
A retrieval engine that sits beside the existing system, reads what it already produces, and closes customer support. Revenue is site licence, which suits a buyer who wants the cost to track the value rather than the seat count.
| Total addressable market | $647M |
|---|---|
| Category growth (CAGR) | 8% |
| Annual contract value | $8.9k – $89k |
| Pricing model | Site licence |
| Time to first revenue | 87 days |
| Startup cost to MVP | $16k – $36k |
| Build effort | ~1 quarter |
Retrieval over private documents became cheap enough to run per query. Utilities is growing at roughly 11% a year, and this job has not been re-tooled since it was designed around paper.
| Who | The gap |
|---|---|
| The incumbent suite | Sells a platform; this job is one neglected module inside it |
| A spreadsheet | The real incumbent in most of the market, and it is free |
| An offshore back office | Cheaper per hour, but does not scale down to the tail |
The data you need lives on paper in a back office; digitisation is half the product.
An idea you cannot act on is entertainment. Four concrete steps, wired to tools already running on AltFTool.
Score problem urgency, willingness to pay, and reachable audience size before writing any code.
→ AltF IdeaLabAsk how they handle this today and what it costs them. If nobody can quantify the pain, the demand score is optimistic.
→ Survey BuilderCheck availability, DNS, and email authentication in one pass so your first outreach lands in an inbox.
→ AltF DomainOpsStand up intake, the review queue, and billing before you build the clever part.
→ AltF Flow