Recovering $1.6M a year in project hours

Terawatt Infrastructure is a leading EV charging infrastructure platform for commercial EV and autonomous fleets. With $1B+ raised, Terawatt owns and operates the full EV charging stack: everything from finding powered land to the daily hardware operations.

The process of integrating all of these workstreams is highly complex, and one of the biggest challenges we discovered early on was project time tracking.

Like most manual data entry tasks, submitting a timesheet twice a month sat on the back burner until the deadline. Reconstructing two weeks of work by combing through Slack messages, emails and calendar events was extremely time consuming. Automating that audit, we estimated, would return about 67 hours a month across the company.

But the larger cost was not time. Terawatt's development managers perform project work that is reimbursable against the projects themselves, so hours that are unrecorded go unrecovered.

After talking with Terawatt's development leadership, we estimated that under-captured hours were leaving $1M to $1.6M of reimbursable cost unclaimed each year.

In other words, the money was already in the projects and the work had already been done. Only the capture was missing, because two weeks reconstructed from memory is systematically under-reported.

Before we arrived, Construction PM Danny Chaviano prototyped a Claude skill to automate his own timesheet generation using off-the-shelf Claude connectors. It worked on his laptop, but when he shared it with others they hit several blocking issues. We rebuilt that prototype to make it production ready.

• Dynamic project coding. Danny's projects were hard-coded into the original skill. We reworked it so Claude infers projects through Smartsheet lookups and stores them in user memory, so subsequent runs already know the user's projects.
• Built-in data validation. Sites are referred to by address, and addresses appear inconsistently across company systems ("Street" vs. "St"). Mismatches made the output difficult to import. We built a reference workbook with data validation on every cell, so incorrectly coded values are flagged automatically.
• BambooHR integration. The old skill instructed Claude to create a Google Sheet as the final product, which was then shared with HR administrator Princess Montenegro, creating additional overhead to bring it into BambooHR. In the new version we built a custom BambooHR MCP connector that lets Claude submit hours for manager approval automatically, after user review.

That final step required some custom engineering, but it was the key to automating this workflow without shifting the overhead onto the HR team.

We demoed the skill at a company all-hands and installed it with everyone who submits timesheets. Because timesheets are due at the same point in every cycle, we also scheduled the skill to run three days before the expected deadline, twice a month.

Our initial discovery had surfaced more opportunities than timesheet tracking alone. In our continued work with Terawatt we take on the cross-functional builds like time tracking end to end, while simultaneously running training programs that empower individuals to build their own AI tools.

• Group workshops. 60 minute group sessions where we dive deep into specific topics like Claude Cowork vs Chat, or common pitfalls in building skills.
• Office hours and 1-1 sessions. 15 minute sessions for individual troubleshooting and feedback.
• Company-wide demos. Showcasing the most interesting use cases of AI to inspire new ideas.