Utility operations, re-architected for AI
We turn the AI across your meter-to-cash, collections, service and the energy transition into compounding outcomes
Compounding utilities domain intelligence
25+ years across energy, water & home services
- 50% increase in net collections yield | NPS +70
- 80% smart-meter conversion vs a 30% target
- Recognized in the Utilities Digital Services RadarView 2025
Why IT Matters NOW
Everyone has AI. Few have it running the operation.
Across energy, water, and home services, AI is in every pilot, yet affordability pressure, rising arrears, and the energy transition continue to reshape operations under a regulator's scrutiny of how vulnerable customers are served. Harnessing AI to move cost, cash and service takes an operating system: the domain rules, context and live signals that turn scattered AI into outcomes.
Affordability
Rising
customer debt and arrears at elevated levels
Affordability is the defining pressureArrears and hardship are structural, not seasonal—and the regulator expects fair, supportive treatment of vulnerable customers. Collections has to recover cash and protect the relationship.
Cost to serve
30%–40%
cost-to-serve reduction achievable with AI-led operations
Legacy meter-to-cash is the cost anchor
Billing complexity, exceptions and manual handoffs dominate operating cost. The unmet mandate is running meter-to-cash autonomously—without breaking accuracy or trust.
Billing complexity, exceptions and manual handoffs dominate operating cost. The unmet mandate is running meter-to-cash autonomously—without breaking accuracy or trust.
The transition
Net zero
decarbonization and electrification reshaping demand and service
The transition rewrites the operation
Smart metering, electrification and new tariffs change every customer journey. The operating model designed now is the one that scales as the transition accelerates.
Smart metering, electrification and new tariffs change every customer journey. The operating model designed now is the one that scales as the transition accelerates.
We don’t bolt AI onto the meter. We re-architect it for AI—meter to cash—and run it, so intelligence actually operates.
Proof in production
Real outcomes, inside real utilities
Operations run to the number—across collections, meter-to-cash, acquisition and service, for energy, water and home-services providers.
Collections | UK energy supplier
Collections yield, transformed
A UK electricity and gas supplier expanded its customer-service function to handle collections—training associates to assess each customer’s situation, negotiate a repayment plan and collect on the call—eliminating the need for a separate collections team.
Net promoter score jumped to +70 alongside the cash recovery.
50%
increase in net yield
35%
more cash collected on calls
11%
more payments collected
Acquisition & smart metering | UK energy supplier
Growth at acceptable margin
A UK electricity and gas supplier ran inbound and outbound acquisition, retention and win-back alongside a smart-meter conversion programme—competing with price-comparison sites while protecting margin.
£2M incremental annualized revenue above BAU, at £400K lower cost of sale.
£58
cost per gain at acceptable margin
80%
smart-meter conversion (30% target)
£2M
incremental annual revenue
Kairos the operating system
The operating system that turns intelligence into outcomes
It sits between your systems of record and the agents you run, giving every AI system the memory, domain rules, and live signals it needs to act with the full picture across every utility workflow and customer segment.
The operating system compounds domain intelligence, not rented model horsepower. AI models commoditize, but the utilities judgment encoded in the Domain Harness does not. It is portable across any agent stack, with no lock-in.
The operating system compounds domain intelligence, not rented model horsepower. AI models commoditize, but the utilities judgment encoded in the Domain Harness does not. It is portable across any agent stack, with no lock-in.
05
AI-native operations: Agents
Service, billing, and collections copilots, smart meter and field coordination agents, and complaints and vulnerable customer support agents execute across meter to cash, collections, and customer service.
Varies by utility
04
Domain Intelligence: Domain Harness
The Domain Harness encodes what should happen through 25 years of utilities expertise captured as pre-built skills, playbooks, and guardrails for billing and meter-to-cash logic, affordability and hardship policies, vulnerable customer handling, and Ofgem and Consumer Duty rules. It is portable across any agent stack, with no lock-in.
Core · compounds
03
Organizational context: Intelligent Context Framework (ICF)
The ICF captures what happened by carrying account and meter state, consumption and payment history, and hardship and Priority Services status in real time. It explains the gap between what should happen and what actually did.
Core · compounds
02
Operations intelligence · Sensors
Operations Intelligence captures what's happening in flight through conversation and process intelligence across customer contacts and billing, along with signals from payment behavior and consumption. It flags arrears risk, customer vulnerability, and rework before they cost you.
Core · compounds
01
Systems of record
Your billing and CIS, meter-data and smart-metering platforms, CRM and field systems—connected via APIs and standard rails, inside your cloud. Read from, not replaced.
Varies by utility
Where the signal becomes memory
Learn about the Intelligent Context Framework
What we engineer for utilities
From the meter to the customer—across the value chain
Where we put technology to work across utilities—each powered by a Tech Services capability, and each behind a solution for energy, water, oil & gas and home-services providers.
Meter-to-cash and billing operations
35% more cash collected on calls
We modernize billing, exceptions, meter-data management and revenue assurance, connecting them to your CIS and meter-data platforms so agents can act safely, end to end.
Systems, application and data engineering
Collections, debt, and affordability
50% higher net collections yield
We manage arrears, hardship and recovery with propensity-to-pay and affordability models that prioritize recovery while treating vulnerable customers fairly.
Sensor and operations intelligence
Customer service and vulnerable-customer care
NPS +70 on energy service
We deliver omnichannel service across billing, moves and complaints, with context and sentiment that improve NPS and identify vulnerable customers for the right support at the right moment.
Context and knowledge engineering
Acquisition, retention, and smart metering
80% smart-meter conversion vs 30% target
We orchestrate acquisition, win-back and smart-meter conversion across agents and humans, with margin-aware targeting and conversion intelligence built in.
Agentic orchestration
Field and transition operations
field service intelligence | fewer repeat visits
We coordinate field service, installs and energy-transition journeys—including electrification, new tariffs and home services—using playbooks that scale, with field service intelligence that verifies work at the point of service and helps prevent repeat visits.
Domain harness engineering
Meter-to-cash | process intelligence
Meter-to-cash process intelligence
We apply a process-intelligence layer over your SAP-based billing and CIS to provide real-time visibility across the meter-to-cash cycle, pinpointing billing delays, estimate-versus-actual gaps, exception backlogs and unbilled revenue while reducing manual re-reads and truck rolls. We replace reactive issue chasing with proactive, data-led performance improvement, with recovered revenue and cash flow tracked.
Powered by sensor and operations intelligence
Field service | visual intelligence
Field service intelligence
We turn video-first field capture into structured, verifiable data, validating installs, surveys, safety checks and asset inspections against job rules at the point of work. We catch exceptions before a second visit is needed and provide an audit-ready evidence trail for more right-first-time field work and fewer repeat truck rolls.
Powered by sensor and operations intelligence
The utilities solutions this powers
The technology above runs behind our utilities solutions, across segments. Explore the ones built for your business:
Meter-to-Cash
Collections & Debt
Customer Service
Smart Metering
Acquisition & Retention
Complaints & Vulnerability
Trust & Compliance
Compliance and fair treatment. By design.
We operate within the regulatory frameworks that govern utilities. Compliance and fair treatment are built in from the start of every engagement, not audited at the end. Hard compliance and fair treatment boundaries prevent agents from overriding controls, and audit-ready decision traces exist at every layer.
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SOC 2 Type II
ISO 27001
PCI DSS
ISO 9001
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Ofgem · Consumer Duty (UK)
GDPR · data protection
Compliance, architected in
Rules at the moment of action
UK frameworks—Ofgem licence conditions, Consumer Duty, the price cap, Priority Services Register and vulnerable-customer obligations—alongside US public-utility-commission rules, EU obligations and GDPR, encoded as guardrails inside the workflow.
Decision traceability
Audit-ready by design
Every agent decision leaves an immutable trace of action, actor and evidence, and surfaces the reasoning that drove it—reconstructable for a regulator or a fair-treatment review, by design.
Progressive trust
Autonomy that’s earned
Human-in-the-loop for high-stakes hardship and vulnerability calls, human-on-the-loop for monitored workflows, autonomous only where trust and performance are proven.
full-stack operator
Intelligence That Operates
Where it starts
Operating-model and AI diagnostic
Most engagements start with a diagnostic that frames the value at stake across the value chain before anything is built.
Explore consulting
The signal
Sensor and operations intelligence
The conversation, process and payment-behaviour intelligence that flags arrears, vulnerability and rework in flight—the signal behind every next-best action.
Explore the capability
How WE Engage
Transform, implement, and operate
Not a consulting engagement, not an outsourcing contract—a single motion from operating-model redesign to agentic operations at scale, under one roof and one contract, with outcomes underwritten.
Good questions to start with
How is this different from a scaled SI, or an AI-native energy-tech player?
Scaled system integrators bring breadth, but generalist playbooks. AI-native and energy-tech players bring model horsepower you’re effectively renting—without the operating depth to run a regulated, fairness-critical operation. We bring 25 years of utilities domain intelligence encoded as a harness, re-architect the operation for AI, and run it with outcomes underwritten—domain IP that compounds and stays portable, with no lock-in. Models commoditize; the meter-to-cash and fair-treatment judgement doesn’t.
How do you handle vulnerable customers and fair treatment?
Affordability, hardship and Priority Services obligations are built into the harness as guardrails—so collections recovers cash while treating customers fairly, with vulnerability flagged in flight for the right support and an audit-ready trace of every decision. Fair treatment is architected in, not bolted on.
Do you build the AI models yourselves?
We don’t build foundation models from scratch. We select, fine-tune and evaluate the propensity-to-pay, affordability and consumption models on your data as your data services partner—see AI Data Services—and orchestrate the models you already run inside the operating system.
What does an AI operating system mean for a utility?
It means your meter-to-cash, collections and service agents act on one account-and-meter context, your encoded billing and fair-treatment rules, and live signals—not as standalone tools. That’s what lets AI run utility operations dependably and compound as your own intelligence.
INSIGHTS
Latest from the Firstsource team
Insights from the field, real operations, real outcomes, and perspectives from the people making it work in live operations.
Case Study
How a multi-state US electric utility accelerated $305M through digital outreach
A large, multi-state US electric utility partnered with Firstsource to modernize its collections and customer outreach operations through digital communications. The objective was to supplement existing mailed and field-based processes with timely, electronic outreach that could expand customer response windows, encourage self-serve payments, and reduce reliance on field activity.
CONTACT US
See where AI changes your cost and risk first
Start with a diagnostic across mortgage, lending, cards and fraud. We’ll frame the value at stake—and the first operation to re-architect—before you commit to anything further.