In The Ghost in the Machine, we looked at how the pending Kraken demerger signals something larger than a restructure. AI-driven platforms are redefining how energy businesses interact with customers, turning billing systems into engines of insight and transforming customers from passive users into actual points of presence within the energy system. No longer ghosts in the machine, active, sentient points of generation and consumption – mini generation assets, if you will.
The question isn’t who sells the power anymore. It’s who understands the customer best.
From Cost Efficiency to Intelligence at Scale
For decades, retailers competed on price; how efficiently they could buy, bill, and deliver electricity. That race is over. The margin for efficiency has flattened, and the value now lies in the data that surrounds the kilowatt hour.
Billing platforms were once about lowering the cost to serve. They automated invoices, smoothed settlements, and allowed businesses to handle scale more efficiently. As data became more integral to managing operations, wholesale exposure, and risk, those same systems evolved. With the acceleration of AI, they are now capable of something more ambitious.
AI platforms don’t just process transactions. They learn, adapt, and personalise. Billing is now one of the most data-rich touchpoints between a retailer and its customers. It’s where consumption, pricing, preferences, and engagement all converge. When coupled with AI, it becomes a foundation for intelligent customer experiences and products, rather than a back-office process.
As these systems become more capable, trust and transparency will define their success. Customers will expect to understand how their data informs pricing and product design, not simply consent to it. Retailers that can explain how data creates value will build loyalty faster than those that only automate it.
Billing is now one of the most data-rich touchpoints between a retailer and its customers.
The Next Evolution of Energy Retail
Where billing systems once managed transactions, AI offers the ability to turn them into platforms for personalisation and innovation. Energy retailers now face a choice about what kind of business they want to be. And this is based on the type of customer that provides the most opportunity to their business.
Some will continue to focus on traditional price competition, optimising for scale and operational efficiency. Their focus will be to serve the ‘Price Warriors’ – the bottom 15% that are frequently checking market offers and driving churn. AI provides a means to continue to find the cheapest price, while combining AI and billing to achieve the lowest cost to serve.
A few will aim higher, developing platforms that make energy a connected, digital experience, where data and customer insights drive entirely new forms of value – to satisfy the fledgling ‘Energy Warriors’ segment.
Early innovators like Amber showed that there are customers who want more than a bill. They want visibility and control, access to live prices and the ability to shape their own energy use. And that was before the cost-of-living crisis was a common epithet. That expectation has now become a baseline for the Energy Warrior customer experience and retention. AI-driven platforms have absorbed it, embedding dynamic pricing, predictive analytics, and automated energy management into the system itself. Visibility is no longer the differentiator; intelligence is.
And then there is the rest – the majority of the market. The customers who simply expect the lights to turn on at night, trusting that their retailer has them on the best plan and pays with direct debit for that trust. The custodians of these consumers will likely adopt AI to pursue flexibility, building products around real-time usage, vertical and/or horizontal integration strategies, demand response, and embedded intelligence in efforts to reduce churn.
The kilowatt hour will always be the unit we bill, but it’s the data behind it that defines the future of energy.
The question for investment is whether a retailer is catering to their core segment or expanding to all three. If all three, it will take different AI investment depending on the segment and desire of the retailer – where do they want to maintain, grow and transition the customer to? Is the goal to increase customer lifetime value in the simple user market, or enable them to become more interactive with their usage and move them into the Energy Warrior bracket? Can you change the mindset of Price Warriors through building trust by providing this segment with usage analytics and forecasting, demonstrating when they’ll maximise savings with you until their price sensitivity anxieties are nullified? And do you want to?
Retailers that take the AI platform route will find themselves moving beyond transactions, becoming data-enabled orchestrators that diversify customer experiences, enabling them to make smarter decisions, improving their sensitivities, and become more trusting of their provider. In doing so, they reduce risk, strengthen margins, build a competitive advantage that price alone can’t deliver and create options for diversification, vertically or horizontally.
For those willing to invest, the kilowatt hour stops being the product. It becomes the platform; the foundation for smarter tariffs, predictive energy services, and new offerings for increasingly data-literate consumers.
The kilowatt hour will always be the unit we bill, but it’s the data behind it that defines the future of energy.
Retailers that recognise this shift will not just survive the transition. They will lead it, building ecosystems where insight, trust, and customer value flow as seamlessly as power through the grid.