If we get it right, customers may never need to ask a question again.

But let’s be clear: there’s as much risk here as there is reward. Treat GenAI like a magic wand, and you’ll hallucinate your way into reputational damage. Treat it like a teammate, carefully trained, clearly guided, and respected for what it can’t do, and you unlock real competitive advantage.

The use of generative AI in energy is no longer hypothetical; it’s happening now. Yet success isn’t measured by whether you’ve deployed a chatbot or automated some back-office workflows. The winners in this space will be the companies who strike a careful balance between innovation and control, between automation and humanity. That balanced approach needs to extend to how you set goals for your AI as well. If you drive it with only a single metric, say, minimising average call time, the AI will find a way to hit that target, often at the expense of quality or customer satisfaction. Instead, define success across multiple dimensions: make sure your GenAI agent is optimising for efficiency, accuracy, compliance, and customer happiness together, so it can’t game the system by sacrificing one outcome for another.

Start Simple, Stay Smart

Energy providers shouldn’t dive into GenAI with the expectation of solving the hardest problems first. Start small. Use AI to field routine customer queries, book service appointments, or send proactive outage alerts. Keep the complex, nuanced cases, like hardship policies, billing disputes, or support for vulnerable customers, for well-trained humans who can empathise and exercise discretion. Even when you hand certain tasks over to the AI, keep a human in the loop for the big decisions. That means inserting manual checkpoints for high-impact actions: if the AI is about to implement a major account change or send out a sensitive communication, a person should review and approve it first.

Your AI doesn’t need to be all-knowing; it needs to be trained. That means running pilots with friendly internal staff, pressure-testing use cases, and learning from failure before rolling out to production. Let your teams break things in testing, not in front of customers. Just like your digital ecosystems, quality and full feature sets rule.
While you’re piloting, also try breaking tasks into smaller, modular steps with a validation check after each one. This way, a minor mistake can be caught and corrected early rather than compounding into a larger problem. For especially critical processes, you might even deploy two AI models in parallel to double-check each other’s outputs, if their answers differ, that’s a red flag to pause and investigate before any action is taken.

Guardrails, Not Guesswork

Hallucination is a real risk. We’ve all seen the headlines: AI agents confidently delivering inaccurate or misleading information. You can’t afford that in a regulated sector like energy. That’s why industry-specific FAQs, documented flows, and clearly articulated “do and don’t” scopes for your agents are essential. You should also give your AI a firm grounding in real data, connect it to a verified internal knowledge base or document store so it pulls facts from a trusted source instead of making them up. You wouldn’t let a new hire talk to customers without a playbook; your AI deserves the same. Those “do and don’t” guidelines should serve as explicit constraints on what the AI can and cannot do, effectively giving it a built-in ethical compass during decision-making.

Another key guardrail is transparency. Make sure the AI keeps an action log or even a “chain-of-thought” trace of how it reaches its conclusions. This way, if something ever goes sideways, you can retrace the AI’s steps, audit its reasoning, and quickly pinpoint what went wrong (and why).

And privacy? That’s non-negotiable. Keep your LLM instances private, off the public internet. Build in strong security guardrails from the start. For example, restrict the AI’s access to sensitive systems using role-based permissions, and limit the actions it can perform to a predefined allow list of approved commands. On top of that, put filters in place for potentially malicious inputs, a layer to detect and sanitise prompt injection attacks before they cause any harm.

A smart approach also means making the model your own, not just embedding knowledge, but also your company’s tone, processes, and priorities. Embed your internal process documents directly into the model. Train it not just on what you do, but how you do it. However, customising your AI isn’t only about knowledge, it’s about values too. Be sure to conduct regular bias audits on the data and the AI’s outputs to catch any unintended skew. This ensures your AI doesn’t inadvertently amplify biases and that it treats all customers fairly, in line with your company’s standards.

Teach Your AI the Industry

Don’t expect a general-purpose LLM to know what a tariff code is, or why a customer might be on a demand time-of-use plan. You must build industry awareness into the model; otherwise, you’re starting every conversation with a blank slate. Imagine on boarding a new employee with no knowledge of utilities, regulations, or customer expectations.

That’s your GenAI agent, untrained. Industry-specific context, vocabulary, and workflows must be deeply embedded. It’s the difference between a helpful assistant and a glorified autocomplete engine.

It’s Not Just About Cost

Let’s not pretend money isn’t a major factor. GenAI promises significant cost savings through automation, reduced handle time, fewer errors, and increased scalability. But cost alone isn’t the metric. You’re also buying flexibility, speed, and the ability to continuously adapt.

That’s why understanding your AI vendor’s commercial model is crucial – subscription-based? usage-based? hybrid? It matters.

Get this wrong and your cost-to-serve could spiral; get it right, and you unlock transformative ROI. At the end of the day, customers will choose providers who balance service, value, and trust. GenAI can help you win on all three, but only if you wield it wisely.

The Human Element Isn’t Going Anywhere

The myth that AI will replace human agents en masse is just that: a myth. What we’re really doing is redeploying human empathy and expertise to where it matters most. AI handles the repetitive; people handle the personal.

That might be the most important shift of all, and it needs to be managed carefully. Keep an eye on the ripple effects of this change: retrain and upskill your team to mitigate any job displacement and pay attention to customer sentiment so that trust isn’t eroded as more interactions become automated. In the coming years, the best-performing energy providers won’t just use GenAI, they’ll partner with it. Train it. Teach it. Trust it with the right guardrails.

To learn more about how Hansen’s GenAI solutions can revolutionise customer experience, click here.

The post GenAI Is Rewriting the Energy Sector – But Only If You Treat It Like a Teammate, not a Tool appeared first on Hansen Technologies.

Here are some reflections and musings on the key opportunities and priorities for the industry.

Software Is Now Centre Stage

One big shift I noticed this year: the conversation around software has matured.  It’s not just “support infrastructure” anymore but is seen as the engine room of the energy transition.

Smart platforms are now critical for integrating solar, EVs, community batteries, and flexible loads.  The industry requires intelligent orchestration to scale and remain stable.

This is exactly the space we’re focused on at Hansen.  From real-time data layers to cloud-native billing and DER orchestration tools, our Hansen CIS product and Digital Suite modules are helping retailers and networks stay one step ahead of growing system complexity.

AI Has Arrived and It’s Delivering Value

AI was everywhere at AEW 2025.  While some sessions stayed pretty surface-level, a few stood out by showing that AI is moving beyond the buzz with real examples now of it being operationalised and scaled in the field.

What stood out most to me was the growing consensus around where AI is delivering today:

• Customer service: Modern AI virtual assistants are starting to manage complex calls, solving issues faster, and reducing cost-to-serve.
• CER orchestration: AI-driven optimisation is helping platforms enables smarter battery charging, VPP participation, and real-time pricing signals.
• CX automation: Personalised onboarding, guided flows, and intuitive self-service are being quietly revolutionised behind the scenes.

At Hansen, we are well past the buzz!  Right now, we’ve got over 50 AI pilots running across the business, ranging from smart DevOps automation to customer-facing initiatives.  Our engineering teams are using AI to modernise codebases, accelerate testing, and automate config generation.

AI Call Centre Agents are now embedded across multiple CIS platforms, providing multilingual, proactive customer support, handling billing questions, service transfers, and setting up payment plans.

On the product side, we’ve introduced AI-generated bill summaries, predictive plan recommendations, and real-time tariff optimisation.

We’ve also got AI agents coordinating behind the scenes, querying usage data, triggering workflows, closing the loop with customers, with automation and orchestration.

Trust, Affordability, and the Digital Retail Gap

The other big theme that kept cropping up, was trust.  One stat stuck with me: 86% of energy consumers don’t trust their retailer.  That’s a brutal starting point in a market trying to sell electrification, smart tariffs, and energy services.

Affordability is also front and centre. Between rising debt levels, energy hardship, and compliance burdens, retailers are facing pressure from every side.

But here’s the thing: the answer isn’t just regulation or rebates.  The opportunity lies more so in platforms that can help people understand and control their energy use, simply and transparently.

That’s why we’re investing in tools like:

• Plain-language bill summaries powered by AI.
• Self-service UX with proactive notifications (before the bill shock hits).
• Real-time usage insights and smart plan recommendations.

If, as an industry, we want customers to stay engaged (and not churn the second they’re confused), we must build platforms that meet them where they are and earn their trust with every interaction.

Where Hansen Goes Next

AEW 2025 reinforced that the real advantage isn’t just having tech, it’s being able to adapt it quickly to a moving landscape.  That’s why, at Hansen, we’re focused on:

• Modular, cloud-native systems that evolve with regulation and demand
• Real AI tools that lower operating costs and improve CX
• CER and DER orchestration that’s simple for customers and scalable for retailers
• Composable platforms that play well with others

We’re not just building software, we’re contributing to a bigger shift, helping our customers and the wider ecosystem become more agile, more connected, and better equipped for a complex, customer-driven energy future.

The post Australian Energy Week 2025: Why Software (and AI) is Now the Real Infrastructure appeared first on Hansen Technologies.

A Safe Channel 

Yet in these days, where scams and fraud are rife, the more traditional ‘digital’ engagement methods of email and SMS are increasingly being ignored. Trust has been eroded. 

Where smart companies are moving to is investing in digital enablement platforms. These are platforms that allow your consumers to self-serve to a degree with traditional and advanced functions. They also enable you to more specifically tailor and personalise offers and messages to consumers, leveraging the deep analytics within the platform. The security that is embedded within it means you and your customers can be assured that any messages are completely legitimate. 

Hansen Self Service Portal 

At Hansen, our Hansen Self Service Portal allows enables our customers, whether they are engaging with the mass market or commercial and industrial sectors, to provide very tailored energy solutions to their customers.  

How? By integrating customer data, energy consumption patterns, consumer energy resources and predictive analytics to offer more personalised energy management services. These range from traditional self-serve functions to more advanced virtual power plant widgets and energy-saving recommendations.  

The result – increased energy efficiency on the customer’s part and greater customer satisfaction, helping consumers make informed decisions about their energy consumption. Insights leverage data analytics to offer actionable intelligence, enabling utility companies to create more effective and personalised engagement strategies. 

Layering in a digital enablement platform doesn’t mean you need to stop using your other communications and marketing methods. On the contrary, taking an omni-channel approach to digital engagement just further boosts your propensity to improve loyalty and lower churn. 

Power in Partnerships 

Hansen’s SDK creates opportunities for co-development among our product teams worldwide, promoting innovation and ensuring our solutions address the diverse needs of our global customers. Moreover, we offer advanced features for customers facing hardship and requiring payment plans, helping them access essential services without undue stress. As more customers embrace digital solutions, it helps maintain a balanced ratio of customer service agents to customers, with an increasing number of customers opting to self-serve over time. 

Where we see the best results is when companies encourage customers to engage and interact with them across web, mobile, and social media, and jump into the platform for the last piece of the puzzle – to confirm a new offer. 

If taking your digital customer experience to the next level is something you want to learn more about, reach out to me or any of the team here at Hansen. 

The post Digital Expectations: Balancing Today’s Needs and Tomorrow’s Innovations appeared first on Hansen Technologies.

Over the past year, across various jurisdictions, the sector has witnessed its highest customer turnover rates on record. Amidst this turbulence, the imperative for more innovative products to bolster the transition towards renewable and clean energy looms large. 

This landscape evokes parallels with the telecommunications sector and its evolutionary journey over the past few decades. The advent and proliferation of mobile devices have diminished the demand for fixed-line services, while lightning-fast connectivity has become the new norm. Concurrently, ‘smart’ technologies like IoT and edge computing have risen to prominence. Alongside these advancements, agile disruptors, unencumbered by legacy systems and born in the cloud, have swiftly seized opportunities to redefine the market. 

Parallels in Disruption: Telecom and Energy Sectors’ Digital Evolution 

The rapid pace of disruption in telecom compelled established players to embrace technology not merely to retain customers but to remain competitive. They diversified their offerings, bundled products, and anticipated forthcoming waves of innovation. In essence, they pivoted towards agility. 

Customer Experience as a Competitive Edge 

This transformation journey is now imperative for stakeholders in the energy sector to not only survive but thrive. While the cost of living is a factor in declining customer loyalty, the pivotal role of customer experience cannot be overstated (in the digital space and with your agents). How swiftly an energy company engages, adapts, and proactively offers new solutions profoundly influences customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

In the age where customers demand personalised experiences, making them feel valued is paramount. They seek tailored offers, flexible engagement, and proactive service. Yet, achieving this level of personalisation with vast customer bases may seem daunting. However, as evidenced by the telecom sector, it’s not insurmountable. 

What’s required is a robust technology infrastructure that fosters innovation, guides sales journeys for both existing and prospective customers, ensures regulatory compliance, and enhances the company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). 

However, not all digital enablement products are created equal. 

Looking Ahead: Future Solutions for Digital Enablement 

In the forthcoming posts, I’ll delve deeper into solutions that companies can leverage today to support digital enablement and guided sales journeys. Stay tuned for insights into how these tools can revolutionise the energy sector’s approach to customer engagement and business growth. 

The post Unveiling the Digital Transformation Recipe – The Telco Parallel appeared first on Hansen Technologies.