Three days at the Innovate UtilityCX conference in Tampa with our partners. The AI conversation in utility customer service has moved on from whether to deploy an agent to what it is allowed to touch.
The Innovate UtilityCX conference ran 14–16 April at the Tampa Convention Centre, marking fifty years of the utility customer experience community meeting in one room. We spent the three days on the floor with our partners — Hansen, Harris and SpryPoint.
A conference is a bad place to learn what a product does and a very good place to learn what a market is worried about. Three things came up repeatedly.
The question has changed
Nobody spent much time asking whether an AI agent can hold a phone conversation. That argument is over. The questions were narrower and much harder: what is it allowed to do without a human, what happens when it is wrong, and who can prove afterwards why a given answer was given.
That is a healthier conversation to be having, and a more demanding one. It is also the reason integration depth keeps coming up — an agent that can only read a knowledge base is easy to govern because it cannot do anything. An agent wired into the CIS can finish the job, and now has to be governed properly.
Nobody wants a second contact centre
The utilities we spoke to were wary of anything that creates a parallel channel their staff cannot see into. If a customer talks to an agent at 2am, the CSR who picks up the follow-up call at 9am needs the whole thing in front of them, in the system they already use. An AI channel that logs somewhere else is a new silo, and utilities have enough of those.
The back office came up as often as the front
Several conversations that started on call handling ended up on the work that piles up behind it — exceptions, service order fallout, the manual reconciliation that never quite gets automated. That was not what we expected to be talking about, and it has stayed with us since.
Where we were
We spent the show with our partners rather than at a stand of our own, which turned out to be the right way to do it — the conversations that mattered started with a utility already talking to someone they trust.
Several of the integrations discussed in Tampa have shipped since. If we spoke there and you want to see where they landed, get in touch.