Agentic Enterprise Era | Energy and Utilities Keynote, Dreamforce 2025

AVP Energy and utility Sales, Salesforce, Antoine Bo. And global industry GTM Director, Energy Salesforce, Jason Obeckson.

All right.

Good morning everybody. Good morning, trailblazers. We are thrilled to have you here this morning. This is obviously the most important keynote of the week. We are doing, yes, we are doing energy and utilities this morning and it's absolutely awesome to have all of you with us this morning. As you heard. I'm Antoine Bo. I run the sales team here for energy in the US At Salesforce.

Hey, good morning everyone. I am Jason Obixson. I lead our energy go to market strategy here at Salesforce. And I have the honor and privilege of working with our amazing customers, our incredible product teams to really address some of our industry's most pressing challenges.

So when we were thinking about building this community of ours here around energy, this is really what we wanted to achieve. All of you in one room, sharing successes, learning from one another, hopefully making friends. So, you know, really happy to have all of you here this morning. And then you go back to what Mark was doing during the keynote. He was really focused on technology as the driver for value and ongoing value. And this is what we're going to talk about for the rest of the morning together.

Yeah, that keynote was amazing. It was fire, as the kids like to say. You know, so many great announcements. Agent Force 360 Platform, Agent Force vibes data 360 Supply Chain, Agent Force Supply Chain and a bunch of industry specific agents. You know, digital innovation is moving faster than ever before. It's connecting stakeholders and assets across the value chain. It's allowing workers to be more efficient, but more important than that, it's allowing humans and agents to work together to solve our industry's most pressing challenges. And really that's what we're here to talk about today. How can we apply this agentic vision to what we're all doing collectively in industry and utilities? And I'm so fortunate. We're so fortunate to be joined by some amazing customers, Engie and Eon, who are going to talk a little bit about how they're leveraging agentic AI to transform their enterprises. But before we get started, AB there's something really important we have to do.

Absolutely. Jason, you know this. We got to thank you. First of all, it's 9:00am It's Thursday. I'm amazed that you're all here after last night. Hopefully everybody had an incredible time. I know I did and it was pretty amazing. But thank you truly from the bottom of our hearts coming here, spending three days with us is a huge commitment. So we appreciate that. And just altogether thank you for your business. It's really a privilege to have you with us today.

Great. So we're going to get started and I want to acknowledge this is probably not the most fun place to start our conversation, but I think it's really important for us to acknowledge and kind of lean into the challenges we're having as an industry. So right now, aging infrastructure all over the place, there's a big need for grid and pipeline modernization to handle our expanding energy demands. You know, you hear a lot about the energy trilemma, affordability, security, sustainability. Let's throw trust in there as well. Big need for trust. Fragmented data, siloed systems all over the place. Really difficult to connect people, process and data. A very complex stakeholder landscape that requires a lot of personalized engagement and of course, fixed workforce capacity, labor turnover, always needing to prioritize safety. So I know what you're thinking. That's a lot. That's a lot. That's a lot. Where do we start? How can we address these challenges? And probably most important, where can agentic AI provide immediate value to my business? Not tomorrow, but today.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason. The good news is many of you already use AI and agents, right? We are seeing customers using bots and agents on their website to drive better and faster customer service or to create leads for their sales team. We're seeing sales agents prioritizing lead, helping salespeople be faster and sell to their customers in much better and new ways. So it's already here. But more importantly, your stakeholders are asking for it, right? Your customer wants better customer service. Your people, your team members are asking for it to really focus on value driven activities during their jobs. And certainly your contractors or your field people are asking to be safer on the job and to do their job faster. So it's already here and we can't wait to see what you're going to do with it.

So I completely agree, Antwan. It's not hype, it's here. It's enterprise ready to rock and roll. And you're already seeing a lot of value prop opportunities across the ecosystem. Being able to drive, improve revenue and profitability by lowering the cost to serve and scaling how we outreach to customers, providing safer, resilient operations for all of our stakeholders, employees, contractors, partners, even physical field assets. Being able to handle disruption with flexibility and of course, ecosystem flexibility. Excuse me, ecosystem value. Being able to align with business partners, customers on mutually beneficial business outcomes. The size of the prize is amazing.

Yeah. And let me Take you back just a little bit because I think this is really important. Value has always been our North Star when we developed our product. So if you go back and we think about utilities, energy and we think about all the different use cases that we try to tackle, whether it's like moving, move out or turnaround and any of these processes are very specific to our industry. We knew that we had to build a product just for you and that's what we did when we bought Velocity. But we continue to invest, right? We invested in field service, we invested in mobility, and now we are presenting Agent Force for energy and utilities. Now you have agentic AI powering the platform for all of you to take advantage of.

And that's pretty exciting. We've already had some customers jump in head first. They're going to be up here later today, Eon and Engie to talk a little about what they're doing. But I wanted to give you a quick teaser with some stats. Engie's been able to provide autonomous agents to handle 70 plus percent of their inquiries across 1500 plus cases a day for billing, invoices, energy use, et cetera. And over at Eon they've been able to automate kind of the sales, service and marketing process, lowering their cost of serve and in one cost call center, even quantifying €5 savings per call. So what they're proving is agentic AI is here, it's ready to go and we need to think about not only optimizing processes but reimagining our business in this industry asking ourselves, yeah, we got.

A dream, we got to dream big. This is Dreamforce. So let's dream big. What if every mobile worker had a personal assistant on site?

Or what about if every customer had a personal energy advisor available to them 24 7?

Yes.

And this is why today we are introducing Agent Force 360 for energy and utilities. So you've seen Agent Force, we're going to take that, we're going to apply it to the base energy and utilities platform. And so everywhere throughout the platforms you're going to have agents powering the platform with Agentforce360 for energy and utilities, super powerful.

And we're doing this across every employee from customer service to sales to operations to mobile workforce, across an unlimited number of use cases, billing, contracting, pricing, mobility in the field, scheduling, dispatch, etc. Okay, so you've heard our vision. Hopefully now you know where you're going. So we want to talk about how you get there fast and easy to do that. I want to welcome up Eldi Sote, product marketing lead, energy utilities here at Salesforce, all the way from France celebrating her fourth anniversary. Let's go, Elodie.

Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Antoine. And good morning, everyone. I'm really excited to be here. As Jason said, I'm the energy and utilities product marketing for energy and utilities, which means I get the absolute joy of telling you all about all about our innovations today. Before I do this, because I'm on stage, let me tell you a little bit about myself. In the last six months, I've actually just moved house and I've also made the sleek decision of starting building a house, which means I have had a fair share of interaction with my local energy and utilities providers. And let me tell you that we've made a lot of strides in our industry because this time along it's been a lot easier than previous years. It was very easy for me to compare Mataris with different suppliers. It was very easy for me to choose a supplier, review my quotes, sign my contract, and even I was able to quite easily make a new connection request. It's not gone through yet, but we've made a lot of progress. However, we all know that there are still a lot of gaps in that sales and service journey, mostly because it's still very much a customer versus provider type of relationship. It's not very mutually valuable for me as a customer. So how do we solve this? Well, we have to address the biggest hurdle that we all face, which is siloed data. I'm sure you've all been to many different sessions where you've heard this. You need to unify your data because good AI only works if we have good data. And so we want you to unify your work data, your asset data, your customer data, any stakeholder data that you have. So, so you can really supercharge your employees with the great insight that they need to make smarter decisions. At Salesforce, we call this Energy and Utilities360. The good news is we've designed our agentic Agent Force energy and utilities platform on a trusted and secure data foundation. So it's very easy for you to bring all of your data into that one single platform. That data is here to give context and personalization to all of your process and workflows across your business. The idea here is that you can unify all of your business parts into one single platform for easier collaboration and smarter decisions. When I talk about context, I talk about billing data, consumption insights, or even unstructured data like local regulations. Once you have all of these process and workflows powered with the great data that you have available at your fingertips, it's time to augment those works, the flows and processes. And so I'm really excited to announce today that we've made that easy for you. We've made that easy because we are releasing out of the box purpose built energy and utilities agentic skills. You as of today, we have customer service skills and quoting ordering skills available for you to basically create your own agents within I won't say seconds, but minutes and hours. Very easy to set things up. And from February 2026 we're also releasing upsell, cross sell, multi site quoting and energy advisory skills. There are more agents coming up later that we'll let Suzy, my colleague, introduce to you. So now you can activate agents across all of your business processes to help your employees with removing all of the repetitive and manual work that they used to do. So they can focus on building value at key customer moments, like building rapport at the start of a relationship, giving them advisory as we're trying to build loyalty or even install solar panels because we definitely know that AI can't do that. Yet this is what the new sales and service experience looks like. Humans and agents working together to accelerate business outcomes and improve your efficiency across all of your operations. And there's nothing better to talk about the future than showing it to you in action. And to do that, I want to introduce my wonderful colleague Marcos Velela, who's coming straight from Brazil to be our demo driver today. Give him a big round of applause.

Of course.

So I want you all to imagine something, a world where your utility bill is not something that you just pay at the end of the month. Instead, it's something that we can all control and proactively manage in partnership with our utility. This means optimizing our consumption together and reducing the cost at the end of the month. We all want this, right? And imagine what that looks like if you're a larger customer, how much money you can save and how critical that can be for your operations. So let's head over to utility like Eon that we will be interviewing later to see how Jennifer, our key account manager, is being augmented by AgentForce to improve relationship and drive value for her customer. Jennifer started her day on Slack and she received a notification to let her know that one of our customers, in that case Omega System, is in need of attention. Omega System has been flagged because they're at risk of a low power factor and of high peak demand. Agentforce has also put together a recommendation For Jennifer, in this case running an energy efficiency audit for Megasystem and installing a capacitor bank. Jennifer is not necessarily the most technical expert. So she adds her colleague AgentForce Energy Advisory Agent into the chat because she wants to be able to break down what a low power factor risk means to a customer. And just like that, AgentForce replies to her using enterprise data. Here we go. Now Jennifer wants additional context. So she heads over to the energy and utilities360 that I talked to you about. That one single source of truth. Here she can see previous interaction with her customer. She can see billing and usage consumption patterns. She can even look at energy agreements in place with that customer. This is the Same data that AgentForce used a second ago to provide the context to the trigger notification that Jennifer used. This is why it's important to unify your data so everyone can use the same data to make decisions. Now Jennifer still isn't fully ready to speak to her customer because she wants to understand if this is a one off behavior or if this is actually something that's quite repetitive. So she asks Agent Force to summarize what happened in the last six months with the billing. Agent Force goes and retrieves that data and summarizes the insight for her. And indeed we've seen an increase in 9% which resulted in 10 kilowatts demand. And that's pretty much likely the result of higher operation hours or just additional asset use. Now Jennifer fully understand what happened and so she is ready to reveal the work that Agent Force prepared for her, which is really great. She starts looking at the quote. I've mentioned earlier that we created an opportunity for energy efficiency audit and an installation of a capacitor bank. This is exactly what agentforce has done. He's created a quote or she's created a quote. It's an agent, can be both. And Jennifer reviews it and she's happy with it. So she prepares a final quote to be sent to a customer for review. Her customer feels that's really great advice and approves the quote. And it's showing here directly accepted on the platform. For Jennifer, all that's left to do for her is now to convert this quote into a contract using document generator and send it to her customer for his signature. And that's it. In few minutes, Jennifer saved her customer hundreds if not thousands of dollars for the next bill. Awesome, right? And it feels a little bit like magic. Yay. But I'm not really a good magician because I'm going to reveal to you my trick. Let's head over to Data 360. As I said, good data, good AI needs good data. And here we have brought in metadata, consumption data, billing data onto data cloud to provide Jennifer and Adrian Force with that context. But having data is not enough. We need to make it insightful. So we've created a calculated insight that runs weekly that looks at energy consumption patterns and it's trying to detect anomaly, in this case a low power factor. It detected that Omega system is at risk of a low power factor and that's our insight, which is really great. But now we have to make this insight actionable. So we've made a data action that is prompting Agent Force to take action autonomously on behalf of Jennifer. And this is what you saw earlier, Agent Force taking action. Let's head over to Agent Builder to see how we've built the agent. As you see on the left, we've given the agent lots of skills, starting with billing insight. Billing Insight is what you saw earlier when Jennifer asked her agent to summarize bills in the last six months. We also given it the skill of energy optimization in solution. Let's click into it please, Marco, so we can see how it was built here. We've given AgentForce a few actions and I'm going to show you what you missed earlier if we look at Conversation Preview. When the anomaly was detected, we prompted Agent Force to do a deep analysis of energy consumption. Exactly what you will see here in a second. It's looking at the data, then it's comparing it against the energy agreement in place and then it's looking at the service and products in our catalog to find opportunities for better energy efficiency. Once it's done that, we've also prompted it to take action, creating a quote, creating an opportunity and then flagging this to Jennifer on Slack. And just like that. What used to be a very lengthy, complex and reactive process that only happened when customer called to complain about their high bill is now done proactively, autonomously and just within seconds without Jennifer, with very limited input from Jennifer. This is the power of unifying your critical data, like metering data into Agent Force, Energy and utilities to create more value and create better partnership with your customer. This is a new era for energy advisory and I'm very excited to say it's here now and to talk to you about field service innovation. It's my pleasure to welcome Suzy McMillan, our director of Product here at Salesforce.

Thank you.

Over to you, Suzy.

Yes. How cool is that? Watching agents augment customer service reps all the way to your customers and supporting them. But I get to talk about what really makes customers happy and that's keeping the electricity running, keeping the gas flowing, keeping the water going, and that's field service operation. And so at first I wanted to talk about agent Force for field service. Now, if you missed the keynote, there was this huge, wonderful keynote. You can watch again on Salesforce Plus. Spoiler alert for especially the oil and gas industry and our beloved utilities. Some highlights would be drone dispatch mobile mapping using esri, our data capture, which is our dynamic forms. And what we all know that our technicians and our field mobile workers love is voice to text. So no more punching in with sunlight and big thumbs filling out that form. Now we have voice to text in our data capture form and it is making waves and they are loving it. Before I get into AI for field service, I always like to do a plug on some of our really big products. And what's interesting about being an industry cloud here at Salesforce is we get to scale across many departments and our gigantic utilities, from customer service all the way to field service. One of our new products that we're delivering is called new connections. We call it grid connections. Whether it's an interconnection or a new connection request, it starts in an application process with a developer or with a contractor or with your customer. It goes all the way into new infrastructure being built. Sometimes a meter install in a mobile app in the hands of a technician. We love that story because it really shows the breadth and the depth of energy and utilities in the scale of our package platform, crossing many business units. But now let's talk about agent force for field service. Specifically for energy companies and utilities. We serve schedulers and dispatchers, we serve field mobile support like I was talking about earlier with our text to forms, but also their own agent with any skills you can think of. We also have out of the box skills. You'll see pre work briefs, you'll even see the ability to understand structured, unstructured data around the asset, everything that they need to feel supported. We have teams of field workers, working crews, but we also have individuals out there and we want to make sure that they're supported. And nothing's better than an agent, which we'll show you coming up. And then grid and asset maintenance. How do we prevent catastrophic failures?

Right?

With all the information we have in Salesforce, all the information we have in esri, all the information we have in our asset management systems, how can we have proactive preventive maintenance based on all the information we have put in One spot to prevent these failures and extend the life of equipment. And none of it's possible without ingesting all this data in Data360. Whether it's your consumption data from your smart meter AMI system, whether it's your production data from scada or your IoT data from all the assets managing transmission and distribution. We want this all in one space so that then we can build out these agents, which I'm going to show you shortly for the Personas and the people in your organization that we serve, that our agents serve and help augment their job every day. So I would like to do a demo for you. But before we do the demo, I would like to introduce the one, the only, the beautiful Tess Dunlap. So we're going to have a vegetation management use case and we are going to have a Persona of a manager, director, scheduler named Omar. We're going to have a field tech named Sophia. And in this it's going to be a test and inspect use case. But. And yes, we're going to be talking about testing, inspecting spans. I live in California, I'm here PG&E. I know the millions of pieces of infrastructure they have to go and test and inspect, especially in vegetation management to prevent wildfires and to protect us. But we have gas and pipe maintenance in our oil and gas industry that is important. We have any asset you want to look at to make sure that you can prevent or see any type of degradation or, or vegetation that may be bugging it. This process and this flow works for everybody in the test and inspect use case. Because the point of test and inspect is to have a follow up work order to take care of business so nothing happens and to extend the life of the equipment and to prevent catastrophic failure. So here we are now in our agent builder, our agent force builder and we are going to build an agent or we already have built an agent for Omar. So when we say we build an agent, you see on the left side all of the skills, these are different skills that we build out for our one person that's using agent, he wants to talk to his agent as augmenting his workday. Well, we also have this skill set at the bottom called vegetation management. In here we can put encroachment policies for different locations that your span or your poles are in. We can put environmental policies on what you can do or what you cannot do when you need to notify different landowners before you enter the property. There's a lot of complex information for Omar. We put it all right here. So it's at its fingertips. And he has his own agent to help him get his job done. Well, let's move to Slack now. Omar gets notified in Slack that a drone has been dispatched. And yes, you can schedule drones just like you schedule humans and crews in Salesforce Field service. This is why my demo is cooler than everyone else's. This is a skydio drone. And I bet it's familiar to a lot of people in this crowd because a lot of our customers are already using it. In the oil and gas industry, if it's a tank you need, you can't reach. In the utility industry, if it's for test and inspect, use cases from hard to reach places to dangerous places to prevent any type of safety concerns for humans. Our customers are using drones. This is a skydio drone. A lot of our customers use skydio drones to test and inspect using image technology. Oh, did you already do the video? So you saw that video up there. What Omar did is he remote viewed in. But that drone was responsible for flying a route, taking a picture. And this drone, in our use case, found something in this image recognition technology. With the help of Agent Force, we discovered vegetation that needs to be removed to prevent failure of a piece of equipment. So what does Omar do? He looks at and he's like, I'm going to take a look at this work order that was automatically created for me using Agent 4 by the drone. Thanks, Skydio with the image recognition technology. So he goes into his work order, he can verify and validate that this image, in fact, this vegetation does need to be removed. He has his work plans. And then now he has what we were talking about earlier, an agent helping him. Like, hey, if you want to go out to this place and you want to dispatch a technician to go and remove the vegetation, we have to give him two days notice. So Omar didn't have to do it. The agent did it for him. Like, you want to schedule this? You want to schedule this work? Great. Let's send this letter out to the landowner for this particular property. Because in Salesforce Field Service, we have our assets associated to our work orders, our work plans, our work type. So we can set up, make sure we have everything in place, whether it's permitting, sending out notifications to landowners, as well as making sure all the tools and appropriate equipment and location of this piece of equipment is available for the technician out in the field. So Omar schedules using Agent Force, so he's like, okay, I approve this work order. Looks right to me. Sent out the letter. I'm Going to schedule it. So what agent force does is it matches the skill set. Okay, you need this type of person needs to be out in the next two days because according to the encroachment policy and the schedule and dispatcher will see a new person being scheduled to go and remove this vegetation. So now we're moving into the field worker. So we have Sophia. So Sophia two days later is dispatched to go out and remove this vegetation with the right tools and the right time. She starts her shift, she fills out her timesheet, she makes sure that, yep, she's ready to go. And now she's going to take a look at the work she needs to do for today. A lot of the plugs I talked about earlier, the plugs, about the new innovations for our field service, mobile workers, the guys out in the field by themselves having to take care of business and keep us safe and keep our electricity on the ones we love and care about. These tools are for them. This pre work brief is another agentic experience for Sophia in the field. She can be driving on her way to the job and the pre work brief can be read through Siri in her car. So she kind of knows what to expect. Make sure she has the right tools on the truck. She gets out there, she needs to locate that location, that pole, that span that needs the vegetation removal. That's hard. Another feature that just came out, ESRI embedded maps with all the same layers you have in ESRI desktop solution, but available to Sophia so she can navigate the breadcrumbs to get to that pole. Sophia finds the location, she goes to work, plans to understand what she really needs to do. Make sure she covers all the steps from safety and compliance to taking care of business on that piece of vegetation. After that she has to fill out some forms. Another feature I was plugging earlier today, Sophia goes in and she has a form because she's about to dispose of vegetation and she knows she has to fill something out, but she notices something, something she's like, wait, there's a bird nest. I, I don't know what to do. This is scary. So again, same agent, she goes to her agent and she gets to have a conversation with her buddy who's like, hey, there's a lot of environmental policies, I'm in this region, I found a bird nest. What do I do? The agent says, well, hey, are there any eggs in your bird nest? If not, you're actually allowed to remove it. Sophia feels a little bit more confident about getting her job done all by herself out in the Field today. So then she goes and she completes the form and the last plug of the last awesome product that I know that all the fieldsmen are going to love is voice to text. As you can see, Tess is voice to texting into this form. It's sunny outside, I have my PPE on and I would love to just use my voice and not take my glove off to punch it in. And there you go. How cool is that? So that is our demo for field service. Thank you so much. But something even cooler is actual customers using these agents right now. And with that I'd like to introduce my boss and GM of energy and utilities, Javier Tomah. Yes, here, Tomah. And yes, Stefan.

Thank you, Susie. Thank you, Tess. Great job, Great demo. Thank you for being with us today. Thomas is the CDO of NG Solutions, part of the NG Group, present in more than 30 countries, present across the value chain, more than 100,000 employees worldwide. And then we have also Stefan, leading innovation at the A Group, also present in more than 15 countries, serving close to 50 million clients, I think across different countries. And the first thing we are all eager to hear from you is your experience, how you know, we want to hear how you've gone about implementing some of the use cases in the different countries, different business units and and so on. Can you please explain what are some of the use cases and the value that you are seeing from those?

Well, thank you, Javier, for having us today. What a week.

It's really great to be with you.

So NG is championing the energy transition. We're integrated across the energy value chain, as you rightfully stated. We produce renewable energy, we distribute it and we supply it to B2B and B2C customer. We also provide decarbonization services and digital is quite essential to make this all work out and bring innovation that allow this energy transition to be available and affordable for our clients. Now, of course, we've started to play with AgentIQ as part of this digital initiative that we're bringing. And a couple of use cases I want to share with you today. The first one we alluded to a bit earlier happened in Belgium where in our customer portal we allowed our clients to talk in their natural language. There are several languages spoken in Belgium. That's great that they can express themselves in Flemish, in French and so on. And so they can really inquire very freely about questions they can have on their utility bill. Why is it I'm paying that much this month? Can you explain this evolution, etc. And the agent is fully live it Provides great answers to our clients. It treats more than thousand inquiries every day and in more than 70% of the cases it can close the inquiries on its own. That's quite amazing.

Impressive.

Yeah. And it helps us reimagine the way we go about interacting with our clients. It's also taking real action and can go up to activate EV charging, you know, in the, in the garage of our clients. So that's really, really a great prospect of what comes in the future. In another part of the organization, in our decarbonization services we have a lot of field service workers that go from one side to another at our clients sites to do operation and maintenance work, take care of the assets of our clients. And here our agents help our workers to have optimized schedule throughout their day. Pre work brief, post work brief that they can dictate through the voice, which is much more simple. A bit like what you showcased earlier, but more interesting. We are providing our field workers ways to dictate extra work quotations to our clients. So in a way we're transforming all energy employees in potential salespeople that's very, very exciting. So that they all can contribute to the energy transition and making energy transition affordable for our clients.

That's a big change indeed. Huge, huge change. What about you Estefan? Can you share some of the use cases as well in neon?

Of course. Nevertheless, I heard one really weird thing. I heard that Engie is leading the energy transition. Clearly that was my Q1. So E on is leading the energy transition.

We're championing.

We're both champions. That's good. So let me give you three examples on how we are currently using it. So first of all of all we are about to put live an employee agentic agent. So our employees in the call center who receive millions of calls around the year, they will be for the first time ever having access to almost real time data and to high quality data. And that's really what's going to drive down the time that they spend with the customers. It's really going to also save us quite a lot of money by being able to serve these customers better and faster. In the next step we're going to go ahead and also do an autonomous chat so that the customers have direct access to this engine as well. And another use case to have a round number of three. Here would be where we currently already use email to case. So customer sends us an email saying, you know, I have a new banking account, this is my new account number. But you can already tell that the account number is wrong. So the agentic would already send automatically an email back to the customer saying, hey, I understand you want to change your account number, but are you sure you entered the right number? Because that number seems wrong and the agent in the center wouldn't even have to deal with it. It would be a completely autonomous case. So this is three concrete examples that we are working on right now. And just to give you some scope, around 7508 agents are working for us across about 10 CRM stacks of Salesforce. So the amount of money we're spending in this sales and services department and the amount of money that we can actually save is significant. But also what's really important, the quality of service is also something that we really want to work on. Because I don't know how many of you actually called your utility or an interaction with your utility in the past a year or so, but it's usually somewhere along the lines of having a dentist appointment. So we need to work on that one as well.

But then also, the €5 per call is quite impressive, right? I mean, that is creating impact. Indeed. One of the things that I'm hearing from clients this week and in the past few months is, hey, yes, I mean, we are ideating, we are doing pilots, but it's very difficult for us to move from those pilots to real implementations that create and deliver impact. What were the challenges that you faced in some of those use cases and how did you overcome those? What are the best practices that you can share?

Well, I guess important to remember that this technology is one year old and we all remember that Salesforce announced an agent in like last year as the new big thing. It's quite awesome that we already have real use cases in live and servicing clients and helping us reimagine the way we go at our business. But it's so new that it can be overwhelming. You don't know what you don't know. And obviously if you're trying to come up with a very detailed plan about what is it you want to achieve and you spend too much time on it, you can waste a lot of energy. So the approach we have taken is a pragmatic one. First, we're trying to embark business as early as possible on the journey of reimagining some of our processes. It's like, like a new design experience we're producing. So trying to reimagine our processes. We're trying not to go for incremental optimization, but rather to go at reimagining processes from the ground up and Last but most importantly, we allow ourselves to test and learn. So we're trying a lot of stuff. Some of it won't work, and that's fairly okay. But when we spot use cases that have potential for value, then we go and scale. And I think in that respect, having a Salesforce scaffolding in place is really conducive, I would say.

Okay, we'll go there in the next question. But I want to hear from you, Stefan, first. What are some of the things that you came across and how you solve those?

A very similar answer, actually, especially on the thing that this is new technology. And we in the utility industry, we usually are not the ones that can be considered early adopters. We are running critical infrastructure. The plans that we have made for our infrastructure to be around usually are something that needs to last for 70 years. So if a new technology comes along and if, if something needs to be implemented, utilities take their time to get it done. So building trust, I think was really, really important. Making sure that the first things that we are trying to run, really run well. That was a key challenge that we were facing. And then I think I already alluded to the availability of data. So if you look into our different markets that we are serving. So you take Germany, we have 1 meter reading a year and yes, you did not hear me incorrectly there. We have one meter reading a year that our customers actually put in to our system or they send a little postcard if they are on the old strict. So what do you do with this data and how do you get a golden customer record done? That's something that we really face there as well. But with the Salesforce implementation, we are now on a good track to actually really understand our customers much better.

Great.

So you are really talking about transformation more than a digital implementation or a technology implementation. You need to change processes, you need to change ways of working and technology is part of that. But I want to hear what's your experience on how technology can help you in this case, Salesforce Technology has helped you to over, you know, to do this transformation. And you were starting to allude that in the previous answer.

Yeah, yeah. What we found is that having the scaffolding in place with Salesforce that encompass all a clean layer of data or processes is very, very conducive from a time to market perspective where we would have done developments in, in months before. The use case I alluded to in Belgium was developed in a matter of weeks.

That's impressive.

Yeah, that's very impressive. And further than that, the agent Builder platform comes up with low code and no code capability. So on top of being fast, you can involve business all throughout the process. You can go into that test and learn motion I was talking about and refine your use case to basically redesign your process. And when you're ready, boom, you can really scale. So for me, having Salesforce as this scaffolding was critical and a key success factor, quite frankly, fantastic.

And for you, it's a fun same question. I mean, you're implementing different use cases. How is the energy and utilities and Salesforce platform helping you to speed up the implementation?

So you need to build everything that you're dreaming of on a good foundation, and I think that's really where Salesforce is helping us. The data models, the structure that the tools are able to give you are essential. Because if you're really dreaming of going to the next level and doing something big, but then you're missing the tool and also the tool sets to get it implemented, you're completely lost. So that's, I think, how Salesforce is really helping us to structure this transformation, as you called it, by employing the modules that are already out there and the technologies that are out there. Because I think, especially in large corporations, if you have a North Star, if you have a goal in mind, but you lack the tools and the structure to actually achieve them, you get lost very, very quickly and the program runs into nowhere. And this is, I think, where Salesforce helps us tremendously these days.

Great. Just to wrap up final question, any final piece of advice on how to get started to the audience? Stefan, do you want to go first?

So only one piece of advice or how much time do I have? My one piece of advice would be dream big, but start small. If you're in a large corporate environment, if you're in a utility environment, and you go ahead and say, okay, I want to change this, but I also need to change this and this and this and this. And then you run this huge transformation program that gets you absolutely nowhere in a long, long period of time. Usually the board members, the C suite gets very annoyed by it very, very quickly, and especially with the new technology, because behind it. So my advice would be to really start small. Go to a problem that actually exists in the business that really has the ability to be solved really, really quickly and showcase some successes and showcase them quickly. And we were able to do this. And that's why there was trust in the organization to also tackle the bigger challenges. And I think this dream big, but actually do small steps on the way there is something that really helped us on our transformational journey.

Very good. Thomas, anything to add?

I'm going to repeat myself, but don't go for incremental gain. Redesign your process and indeed start by trial and error. And whenever you find the value, you can go for scaling and Salesforce is great for that. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Big round of applause for our speakers.

Thank you.

Let me bring us home. Our industry is facing massive amount of complexity. Aging infrastructure, raising energy demand, raising customer expectations while dealing with fragmented data. The complexity is immense, but we've seen the solution as well. The future of the industry is human led and AI assisted, but not any AI. You can try to do IY the solution, but then 90% of those projects fail because they are not integrated into your business processes, into your business data. To really create a transformation like the ones that we heard, you need to integrate that solution, AI solution, identity solution into your processes. And it needs to be trusted by your people. And this brings me to the main message that we want to convey today. Salesforce is the platform to allow you to do that. It all starts with unifying your data. Bringing all your data from customer from, from assets, from field service, from external systems like IoT or billing information. It then goes into bringing our industry specific solutions and capabilities with data. Model the processes, the flows and the functionalities that are specific to the industry. And that helps the agents to get a much more meaningful response and action. And then you put the Salesforce agentic layer on top that comes with out of the box templates and actions. And all of that is the great recipe to get you to value faster. And with all of that, we can really help you deliver this transformation. We can help you become the agentic energy company of the future. A company that is not just an energy and service provider. It's much more than that because it's deeply connected to its customers and stakeholders. It's smart about how it manages the work and the assets. It allows employees to to provide much more meaningful interactions and improve that customer experience is resilient, reliable, efficient and innovative. And that vision, that is what we can help you with. This is what we can build together. Let's continue the conversation. Please come join us in our TelBizr community. Visit on the campground and watch Catch up on the, on the, on the sessions that you miss and come talk to us. Let's make this happen.

All right.

Thank you.