HSC Pipeline Engineering: building an engineering knowledge base with RAG AI

HSC Pipeline is a civil engineering firm laying utilities for the nation. Field staff face a steady stream of questions every day, but clashing schedules meant even minor issues could wait three days for a project manager's response. Backlogs snowballed into delays, which drew public complaints, demerit points from clients, and threats to future tenders.

Through AI Singapore's LADP, HSC built an on-premise RAG-enabled AI assistant called the AI Playbook, accessible only over the company intranet. It reads internal documents and answers staff queries with cited sources, so teams can verify the basis of every recommendation. Project teams stopped hunting for answers and started resolving issues directly. HSC also uses the tool as a talking point in its internal AI literacy campaign — a way to teach staff about confidentiality and protection of sensitive documents. The company recommends other construction firms join LADP to start their own AI work.

Caption language: en · Fetched: 2026-05-02

HSC is a civil engineering company that does infrastructure for the nation. We provide services to lay various types of utilities like gas, water, district cooling, power cables and telecom. Our staff actually face a large variety of problems on a day-to-day basis. Of course, we have the option of uh asking the more senior project managers or the project managers on what is the resolutions to such issue. But due to clashing schedules, this often can take up to 3 days to resolve even a minor issue. So when issues start to snowball, this have larger implications to the project. Complaints from the public will actually damage HSC's reputation as a reliable civil engineering company. If the field tasks are not completed, they will snowballs into delay and causing the project timeline to sleep.

Clients then will impose demerit points or fines and this will affect our ability to complete the current projects and also our future tenders. Through the LAP, we built a secure onremise RAG enabled AI assistant that is only accessed through the company's internet. It will take in our documents and use this context to provide funline support to staff queries. It gives accurate enough answers and site sources for traceability back to what was used to arrive at these responses. The AI playbook brings up the most relevant document pages for any scenario at hand. There is less ambiguity regarding whether a cost of action is applicable in the situation. Project teams spend a lot less time looking for answers and instead can refocus to quickly and accurately resolve issues.

This has translated to significant time and cost savings for our timelines. We've tested the AI playbook with our project teams and the response has been largely positive. We used the AI playbook as a talking point in our company's internal AI literacy campaign. We used it to emphasize the importance of business confidentiality and the steps to take to protect our trade secrets, sensitive information and business critical documents. HC is a construction company. We lack expertise on how to design, build and manage AI tools. AISG's LAP provided training and consultation to overcome this shortfalls. Furthermore, AISG's LAP gave us access to professional Gen AI models and case studies. This enabled us to quickly build and test prototypes that eventually led to the AI playbook.

When the playbook was able to consistently and accurately answer our questions on any projects, that was the moment AI changed from a lofty aspiration for us to something more concrete and attainable. Our experience working with the AISG team has been very good. They are well versed in applying AI to use cases and extracting business value from it. Whenever we had questions or stumbled in our app development, they have been supportive and provided much needed knowledge on how to address our various challenges. ESG's LAP is a cost-effective program to quickly pick up the basics of AI app development and drive business value from lowhanging fruits in any company on the front of digital automation. HSC highly recommends other companies to register for the program to jumpstart their AI journeys.