AI Deployment Award
Celebrating utilities that are successfully adopting and deploying AI. This award recognises organisations that have embraced AI at pace to unlock efficiencies, improve service delivery and demonstrate clear business value.
AI Deployment Award
Celebrating utilities that are successfully adopting and deploying AI. This award recognises organisations that have embraced AI at pace to unlock efficiencies, improve service delivery and demonstrate clear business value.
Eleclink and IBM
AMAI — Advanced Monitoring and Asset Intelligence
Eleclink’s 1GW HVDC electricity interconnector between Britain and France can supply power equivalent to around 2 million homes. Maintaining its reliability requires inspection of 360,000 bolts and 56,000 shields across 51km of cable inside the live Channel Tunnel, used by approximately 400 trains each day. Manual slow-motion review of inspection footage took weeks, placed pressure on engineer wellbeing, and increased the risk of missed defects. Working with IBM, Eleclink deployed AMAI — Advanced Monitoring and Asset Intelligence — to review tunnel inspection videos in 24 hours, improving speed, consistency and operational performance.
E.ON Next
Vulnerable Voice Analytics
In-house voice analytics system built to protect vulnerable energy customers by identifying missed Priority Services Register opportunities in call transcripts. The tool uses a Mistral AI foundation model, licenced and optimised with guardrails by our internal AI platform team, accessed via API. The application layer including prompt engineering, data pipeline, governance framework, and Tableau dashboard was built entirely in-house across four business functions. Processing approximately 20,000 calls daily, the system flags 1,500 to 3,000 potentially vulnerable conversations per day, with over 95% confirmed on review. An independent monthly governance review maintains 96.66% accuracy in production.
E.ON Next and Kraken Technologies
Magic Ink: AI tool for faster (and happier) service delivery
Magic Ink is an AI writing assistant embedded in Kraken’s customer management platform. It generates draft responses to customer service queries – drawing from specific account context and history – to help specialists write clear, personal responses, faster. E.ON Next deployed Magic Ink in autumn 2025. Today, over 80% of specialists produce 160,000+ AI-assisted responses a week. This adoption didn’t happen on its own: E.ON Next embraced a cultural transformation to roll-out AI tools in a service sector where job displacement fears run hot. They addressed concerns head-on and implemented human-in-the-loop review for every response, achieving incredible uplift in return.
Everflow
Project Merlin & Ask Evie: putting technology to work for people
Everflow has successfully deployed artificial intelligence to enhance the way colleagues work and customers experience utility services. Rather than replacing people, Project Merlin and EvieAI use AI to provide instant access to operational knowledge, simplify complex processes and support faster, more consistent decision-making. The next phase extends AI into customer interaction analysis, enabling personalised coaching that continually improves service quality. Together, these initiatives have reduced response times, improved employee confidence and strengthened customer satisfaction while creating a scalable AI platform that will support future innovation across customer service, knowledge management, operational efficiency and digital self-service.
EXL Service (UK) and Thames Water
Digital Automation Transformation
EXL and Thames Water have transformed utility services through a digital-first operating model powered by Smart Workflow, AI, NLP, and RPA. Using a collaborative "One Team" approach, they redesigned customer journeys, eliminated inefficiencies, and created an integrated automation ecosystem managing end-to-end customer interactions. In 2025, the initiative automated 1.8 million transactions, over 50% of total volume, delivering benefits equivalent to 102 FTEs. AI-driven workflows, reusable bots, and intelligent case management improved efficiency, compliance, and customer outcomes. With plans to expand automation to 2.3 million transactions annually, the programme provides a scalable blueprint for a resilient, customer-centric utility operation.
Keen AI and National Grid Electricity Transmission
VICAP (AI-Powered OHL Inspection and Condition Assessment Programme)
VICAP is a National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET) NIA-funded multi-year project delivered with Keen AI to use artificial intelligence for automated condition assessment of overhead line (OHL) steelwork. Keen AI’s asset management and inspection platform is used across 95% of National Grid’s tower estate. It uses AI to quality-assure inspection data, link imagery to assets, and detect, localise and grade corrosion, turning imagery into structured condition data. This year, VICAP 3 (2026) developed three AI capabilities: locating corrosion on tower members, measuring wear on load-bearing fittings and assessing internal tower imagery. All three are now being prepared for deployment.
Northern Powergrid and Faculty
Artificial Forecasting (AF) SIF Beta
Demand for electricity is accelerating, driven by electrification of transport and heating, and growth of large-scale developments including data centres. Distribution networks are becoming constrained faster than network reinforcement can be delivered. Artificial Forecasting closes that gap through an AI-powered forecasting capability that predicts half-hourly demand against firm network capacity, from next-day to week-ahead, across thousands of substations. Incorporating weather forecasts, demand patterns and embedded generation, it pinpoints where and when network constraints are likely to occur, enabling proactive, data-driven decision making. The solution reduces costs through targeted flexibility procurement aligned with flexibility service providers and unlocks capacity at scale.
Pennon Group and AiDash
BNGAI: Group-wide AI biodiversity baselining across three water companies
Pennon Group has taken AI-driven biodiversity assessment from pilot to group-wide business as usual. With AiDash, South West Water baselined its operational estate (2,000+ sites, 18,500 habitat parcels) to the Defra Statutory Biodiversity Metric in months, at under half the cost of a field-only survey. In October 2025 Pennon extended it group-wide, adding Bristol Water and SES Water and taking coverage from 6,421 to 8,103 hectares, reassessed in three months. Verified at 90% accuracy by CIEEM-accredited ecologists, the baseline underpins the Pennon Group Biodiversity Strategy and its Non-Deterioration Commitments to Ofwat, giving every Pennon-owned site one standardised, updatable habitat record.