Conclusions

Given the unprecedented challenges facing the utilities industry in terms of the drive to net zero due to the increasing impact of climate change and its ultimate impact on the end customer and employees, it is brilliant to see utilities stepping up. Particularly in their use of data to drive value. Whether it be asset, customer, weather, vehicle or any relevant data source, the insights offered up in this report show concerted action to adopt predictive analytics and explore the benefits of Generative AI to drive operational efficiencies and higher customer satisfaction. These endeavours will help utilities ease the burden of growing workload on their staff and make best use of talent and experience. According to recently releases research from Accenture, 38% of utility working hours can be either automated or augmented by Generative AI. This points to a huge opportunity to build on the foundations that this report shows the industry is laying, to further exploit AI to free up time, skills and creativity to make a difference where it really counts. If additional bandwidth to address complex challenges and pre-empt service problems is coupled with a unified view of asset and customer information, then utilities have a truly unprecedented opportunity to positively transform their operations and the experiences they can offer. They will also radically improve the experience of working in the sector, allowing companies to boost workforce morale and productivity as well as heading off skills and resource shortages. The platform that Salesforce can offer utilities, incorporating AI-driven interfaces in the flow of work for large-scale customer and field operations, can now truly give organisations the 360 degree view of operations and customers that they have long been striving for and allow them to exceed the expectations of customers and regulators in executing their duties as essential service providers and environmental stewards. We’ve recently added new capability to our platform with the launch of Agentforce. We believe this will support breakthroughs for utilities, enabling them to provide a new kind of proactive, scalable and tailored approach to customer interactions. Importantly, we believe that recent advances in AI, which we have captured in Agentforce, are a paradigm shift enabling utilities to let customers self-serve in ways not possible before, understand their own data, take action, and critically allow more empathetic conversations between priority customers and advisers. Disabled customers generally have higher utilities bills due to longer periods of time spent at home and can need more support. By providing more accessible and consistent ways to communicate, and being grounded with policy, customer data, and usage data, utilities can better understand and support these customer needs, ensuring the best possible support is consistently offered, pro-actively. Digitalisation has, and continues to, utterly reimagine the art of the possible for businesses across industries. For companies looking to increase the speed at which they can access these transformational benefits, finding trusted partners who can not only offer fantastic capability in their systems, but who have also thought about how to accelerate deployment and maximise adoption, is essential. This will make the difference between digital ambition and reality for many utilities.