Dial AI and Harris Partner to Bring AI Customer Service to Utilities

Dial AI and Harris have partnered to bring AI customer service to utilities across Harris’s utility software businesses. This is a partnership we have wanted for a long time, and it is a genuinely exciting one to be starting.

Why we are excited about this one

The hard part of an AI agent in this sector is not the conversation. It is knowing what the right answer actually is.

A caller asking why their bill doubled is asking a question with a real answer buried in a rate structure, a budget billing plan, a proration after a move-in, an estimated read that got trued up, or an arrears arrangement that lapsed. Get the account lookup right and the explanation wrong, and you have built something fluent and useless.

Harris has spent decades accumulating exactly that knowledge. Their utility businesses have been writing billing and customer systems since long before anyone was putting AI in front of them, across water, electric, gas and wastewater, for municipals, co-ops and investor-owned utilities of every size. The people there have seen every rate structure and every regulatory quirk in North America, usually more than once.

That is the depth we get to build on. Grace answers the phone; Harris’s teams and systems are the reason the answers are right.

The breadth

The partnership spans Harris’s utility software businesses:

• Cayenta
• Systems & Software — enQuesta
• NorthStar
• Advanced Utility Systems — CIS Infinity
• SilverBlaze
• Cognera

That covers an enormous range of utilities — a few thousand meters through to millions of customers — and it means that if your utility runs one of these, Grace is available to you through the vendor you already work with. You are not waiting for your product to be added to a roadmap, and you are not the first utility to try it on your platform.

What we touch, and what we do not

Your CIS and billing stay exactly where they are. We do not replace them, we do not migrate off them, and we do not ask you to.

The phone system in front of them is the part we take on. Grace can replace it entirely, or answer in front of it while it stays where it is — whichever suits the utility.

Under load

Contact centres in this sector are under more pressure than they have ever been. Volume spikes with every storm and every billing cycle, hiring is slow, and experienced staff spend most of the day on questions they have answered a thousand times while customers hold for a balance.

Grace takes those calls — days, nights, weekends and straight through the surge — and brings in a person the moment a person is what the call needs, with the context already gathered.

Working together, not alongside

The part that matters most to customers is the least visible. Harris and Dial AI build and maintain this jointly, so there is one team behind it and one place to go when something needs attention.

For a utility, that makes adding AI to the contact centre a conversation with people you already have a relationship with rather than an introduction to a vendor you have never heard of.

What’s next

We are already live with utilities across North America, and the work with Harris keeps widening. If you run a Harris platform and want to see what Grace would do with your own calls, book a demo.