How Montana's DNRC saves 125+ hours of salaried work per week with Perplexity Enterprise
99%
faster writing across job descriptions
35
seconds to create initial content drafts
125+
hours saved per week
The Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) is on a mission to ensure Montana's land and water resources provide benefits for present and future generations by managing State-owned Trust Lands, protecting Montana's water resources, managing forest health to reduce wildfire risk, regulating oil and gas exploration and production, and funding conservation efforts across Montana, with over $300 million in grants awarded since 2021.
The Problem
Boosting a lean government agency’s bandwidth on a budget
Chris Powell, CIO at Montana DNRC, heads the 28-person IT team that supports the diverse agency with 20+ field office locations. They also build custom software applications and automations to streamline everyday tasks.
Making all this happen is easier said than done. The biggest resource constraints in government are always time and money. So, in Chris’ opinion, “Anything that automates work so existing employees can move faster and produce better quality work deserves heavy investment.”
Chris knew AI could help his team automate critical tasks like data analysis, but the path to introducing new solutions to government agencies often faces three hurdles:
1. Providing accurate information
“Folks sometimes get into trouble if they take an AI’s output as true without doing any verification,” he says. “We’re obligated to provide timely and accurate information to maintain public confidence in the agency."
2. Empowering his team, not eliminating positions
Chris also says he didn’t want to use AI to replace team members. Instead, he aimed to empower everyone on his team to do what they’re uniquely suited for and automate away distracting busy work. Take the Montana DNRC project management office: Chris’ ideal solution would synthesize large internal data and provide context for project intake in minutes — not hours or days.
3. Changing existing habits and workflows
Working with AI requires new ways of thinking, Chris explains. AI tools can make work easier, but people have to learn how to prompt the model, and they can’t automatically trust its answers. The biggest benefit of an arduous research journey was that you had a greater understanding of the accuracy of your findings.
However, that confidence cost hours of grueling research. AI could get those same answers faster, but the team would need to add another step to their processes to verify the findings. To address these challenges, Montana DNRC needed its AI solution to be:
Reliable: To support accurate research, they needed an AI solution that produces cited results — without the hallucinations common to other AI models.
Approachable: Chris wanted a UX that everyone could easily use. “It needed to demonstrate value right off the bat,” he says, especially because he hoped to implement it beyond his team.
Affordable: As a government agency, the Montana DNRC needed the solution to fit neatly into its lean budget.
Then, Chris tried out the free version of Perplexity for personal use and knew it was the workflow supercharger he’d been looking for at work. When he saw there was an Enterprise version, he was excited to share it with his team.
The Solution
Using Perplexity Enterprise Pro to streamline knowledge work across multiple teams
Onboarding the Montana DNRC IT team to Perplexity Enterprise Pro was a “low-cost, low-risk way for them to dip their toes in the AI water.” From there, the team saw three major benefits:
Benefit #1: Lower activation energy for increased time savings
Perplexity Enterprise Pro eliminates the stress of “blank page syndrome.” Usually, getting started is the hardest part of any task, but Perplexity jumpstarts that step by quickly generating project proposal outlines and rough drafts of key documents. The DNRC team uses Perplexity AI to:
Write job listings in a snap: Writing a job description has high stakes because qualified applicants will immediately click away if it’s not compelling enough. So, writing one listing used to take hours to get right. With Perplexity Enterprise Pro, DNRC now has a workable first draft in under a minute.
Distill and summarize complex documents. There is a lot of scientific research and data in the natural resource management field. The Montana DNRC needs to process and synthesize large amounts of data quickly. Perplexity’s ability to accurately summarize long texts will reduce the time it takes to review research and convert that information to actionable insights.
Speed up code generation: Modifying existing software applications isn’t always intuitive, but Perplexity helps developers code faster by generating a first pass for them. They can also learn as they go by asking Perplexity what certain code blocks do.
Beyond this, the AI continues to save DNRC time with its suggested follow-up questions. For new users, Perplexity’s ML model effectively teaches them how to interact with the AI and ensures they’re never wasting time trying to figure out what to say next.
Benefit #2: More efficient workflows
With Perplexity Enterprise Pro, the Montana DNRC has a helping hand that automates painful busy work at every step. Instead of shouldering through in-depth research or teaching themselves intricate code, they have a powerful virtual assistant that handles repetitive, lower-level tasks.
For example, the Montana DNRC only employs a couple of developers. With Perplexity’s help, anyone on the IT team who is a GIS expert or learning Python can pitch in to write code. Even though they aren’t developers, they can tell Perplexity exactly what they want the script to do and then error-test it in a safe environment.
Not only does this AI boost significantly lighten the IT team’s workload, but it also reduces wait times for everyone on the team. Chris says, “Suddenly, our people who aren’t as experienced in writing code aren’t waiting in queues for their script to be written. Instead, we can do a code review and test the output. Most of the time, only minor edits may be needed, and the application can be released for use straight away.”
This systemic fix is especially critical at a government agency like the Montana DNRC, which uses a variety of older software, including some that were contracted decades ago with vendors that no longer exist. For instance, adjusting even one mysterious, leftover code block from that era used to require extensive research and programming, but now Perplexity provides the information needed to complete these coding side quests in only a few clicks.
Benefit #3: Streamlined fact-checking with citations
The Montana DNRC also uses Perplexity Enterprise Pro to research novel approaches to improving processes and policies. Because the AI only produces information with accurate citations, DNRC has fact-checking peace of mind. Even better, Perplexity AI suggests related questions that encourage deeper research.
Anyone on the Montana DNRC team can embark on deep research and knowledge work with Perplexity as a guide, helping their lean team punch above its weight.
The Result
Saving 125+ hours every single week
Perplexity Enterprise Pro saves Montana DNRC employees upwards of 5 hours of work each week by streamlining the workflows for “high-touch, high-friction work” like writing project proposal outlines. Chris says this delivers massive ROI across his team alone.
“Perplexity takes you from nothing to something within 35 seconds,” he says. He expects that time savings to continue to compound. “The more use cases we find, the more time we save.”
And Perplexity’s popularity is spreading to other agencies in the Montana State Government. Chris says the adoption is a no-brainer, considering Perplexity’s reasonable rates and ability to free up so many hours of salaried work each week. “It’s the approachable entry point to every project and the stepping stone to newer tech that we needed,” he says.
