Top 5 AI Innovations for Utility CIS Solutions

While still early in its “hype cycle,” Artificial Intelligence distinguishes itself with its potential to transform technology across the entire utility industry and virtually all aspects of enterprise operations.  While this space has devoted time to the early applications on customer experience and customer service, we’re impressed at the pace of innovation on multiple solution frontiers supporting the industry.   AI paired with critical solutions can transform the modern utility CX.  Here’s our take on the top 5 AI Innovations for Utility CIS:

• Personalizing Customer Service

• Demand Forecasting

• Fraud Detection and Revenue Protection

• Renewable Energy Integration

• Enhanced Customer Service through Automation and Portals

Personalizing Customer Service: AI powered tools can analyze customer data in a modern CIS solution to understand energy usage patterns, preferences, and customer behaviors to inform models for personalized services including energy savings tips, tailored billing plans, pre-emptive recommendations for payment assistance programs, or key product recommendations.  For example, identifying a cohort of customers from energy use data in the late evening hours consistent with smart EV charging, AI supported CIS solutions can power personalized campaigns in a utility Marketing Automation platform to inform customers and encourage enrollment in time of use rate plans for EV owners, which leads to cost savings for customers and more efficient energy management for utilities.

Demand Forecasting: With advanced predictive analytics powered by modern AI, utilities can combine energy use and captured demand history from CIS solutions with complex data like weather reports, building data, and economic indicators to build more reliable forecasting algorithms to predict future demand.  Utilities can apply these models to adapt to changing customer behavior such as increased adoption of electric vehicles in their market, local and regional driving patterns for EV charging applications, and smart home appliance sales to help utilities anticipate demand shifts to plan accordingly.  

Fraud Detection and Revenue Protection: AI tools in financial services already analyze credit card transactions.  CIS solutions applying these algorithms to continuous streams of commodity consumption data to identify anomalies can detect fraud or theft.  Similar algorithms may predict meter tampering by comparing current consumption data with historical data to detect anomalous activity consistent with fraud to trigger an investigation.  Finally, AI can correlate data from different sources connected to CIS solutions including payment history, customer service records, and consumption data to identify potential cases of fraud or default for the early identification of customers most likely to default on payments, which enables utilities to take proactive measures like payment assistance plans for at-risk accounts, and reduce delinquencies.

Renewable Energy Integration: As renewables like wind and solar increasingly become a fixture in both Commercial and Residential applications, CIS solutions can leverage advanced AI algorithms to optimize performance of renewables among the entire operation of an energy utility.  In scenarios where customers generate renewable energy with net metering eligibility, CIS solutions can more accurately manage the billing and compensation process including advanced analytics related to renewable energy fed back into the grid.  That data feeds more accurate assessment for renewable generation and consumption to be used for effective grid management and strategic planning.

Enhanced Customer Service through Automation and Portals:  CIS solutions capture the most critical customer data for the current generation of customer portals.  Adding advanced capabilities powered by AI enables enhanced self-service and more personalized support options, making utility customer portals the digital options customers increasingly expect from their utilities.  CIS data integrated with AI chatbot capabilities can offer customers virtual assistance to handle routine customer inquiries related to billing questions, service interruptions, or basic program questions.  AI tools can analyze energy and billing data to promote personalized benefits like special rate plans or payment options to reduce the risk of delinquencies or non-payment.

Now that Artificial Intelligence has broken through with initial success in machine learning and natural language processing, along with the accessibility of such very public applications like ChatGPT, more advanced applications and innovations promise to proliferate.  Utilities and their technology partners have begun to experiment with the core capabilities of AI to enhance operations and build for the future.  CIS solutions embracing AI will offer utilities advanced features to power a broader ecosystem of applications across virtually all aspects of the modern utility CX.