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This is partner content from Latitude Studios. Across the country, data centers, factories, and electrification are pushing electricity demand sharply higher. For decades, utilities saw demand change gradually. Growth was something they could forecast years in advance. But that era is over. What we are going through, an era right now, is something that industry has never seen before. The pace of growth of demand and the options for customers has never been like this before. Abhay Gupta is the founder and CEO of Bidgely, which has been using AI since 2012 to help utilities discover how customers are using electricity. More demand is only half the story. Being an electricity customer is also becoming much more dynamic, and sometimes more complicated. All of a sudden, things have become very complex for consumers. Should I buy solar? Should I buy an EV? What is the impact on my bill? My rate plans have introduced complex parameters like time of use rate plan. Does it feel like a very different business in 2026 versus 2012? Massively different. Totally different, absolutely. That's a tension at the heart of the electric utility industry right now. And for Kirby Brindley, OG&E's Director of Customer Experience, it means answering a pressing question. How do you bring customers along? It's not just about keeping the lights on. And our customers want to understand what growth means for their bill, ultimately. How is it going to impact them? Kirby, how have you seen that customer profile adapt over time? And also, how are customers managing that complexity with new rate structures and so forth? Customers have so much more options. And because the landscape has completely changed, within their everyday life because of technology, they have increasing expectations, right? So they're not just wanting a one-size-fits-all approach. They're wanting very personalized approach because they get it in a lot of other interactions that they have every day. That's one of the great things about the Bidgely tools is they're able to provide personalized data and information for the customer because they want to know about, then, they want to know, I want to know about my bill. I want to know about my home and what I can do. We want to try to bring that conversation to that one-to-one customer with, here's your information. Here is your usage. This is what's happening in your home or in your business and what you can do to help control and manage your bill. Utilities Everywhere are searching for new ways to manage rising demand and ease the growing pressure on customers. And increasingly, they're turning to purpose-built AI tools that can pinpoint where the grid is under stress, how customers are using energy, and where support is needed most. Through conversations with utility leaders and Bidgely experts, the series explores how those tools are being applied in practice and what they reveal about the future of the grid. In this episode, our third in the series, Stephen Lacey talks with Kirby Brindley of OG&E and Abhay Gupta, of Bidgely. They discuss how load growth is reshaping the utility-customer relationship, why personalization matters, and how AI is helping OG&E give more power to customers. If they don't understand where the money is going and what components of my bill are costing me most, I mean, how do you actually stand a chance to improve? You don't. You don't. There's two really important pieces to this conversation. One is how to empower customers, make them feel in control, give them a better experience, hopefully lower costs. The other is what those customers can do to improve the system, help manage peaks, maybe open up more grid capacity, help lower rates across the system. So I want to talk about what we can do with this data to help the utility, OG&E specifically, better plan and manage the grid. There was one important discovery that you, you made recently, Kirby. You were trying to understand how many electric vehicles were on your system and whether they were going to create serious grid constraints. What did you think was happening? And then what did you ultimately find when you used Bidgely's analytics platform? So prior to Bidgely's analytics, we believed EV adoption was going to create a little bit more of an urgent grid issue and some more constraints. And so as a business, we were looking at, do we need to invest in programs and tools, more resources, right? And so we were assuming that we would have roughly, I don't know, 50 megawatts of shiftable load related to EV users. And I mean, that's quite a bit when you look at our total, you know, smart hours program. And when we looked at analytics workbench and use the tool as it's intended, we uncovered that, really the impact was going to be closer to three megawatts. And our customers weren't charging during peak hours, right? When they came home from work, we thought they would be plugging it in right at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., but they really weren't. The behavior showed something different. And so the tool really helped us from like over-correcting or moving resources to a problem that actually really wasn't the problem. And wasn't an urgent problem. - Abhay, what does this tell you about the insights that utilities have at their fingertips, this sort of the hidden stories beneath the surface? - I would say this example is a great example of how it helps affordability. Because if you don't have the information, you may go and over-invest in certain parts of the grid, assuming that EV is going to create a problem. But if it's not going to create a problem, then that over-investing ultimately is passed on to consumers as part of their bills increases over the next 10 years. So almost every industry uses intelligence and data to make decisions. And I think we are catching up with these technologies in the energy industry. So our decisions are intelligent. We're investing where it's needed and we're not investing where it's not needed. So we can keep the rates lower and basically go through this transition period of a massive demand growth. - And I think the next question is what happened next, Kirby? So it allowed you, to open up resources to address other problems. And my understanding is that when you looked at the analytics, what you discovered is that customers in the Variable Peak Pricing Program were behaving the opposite way that you were intending. And so that allowed you to uncover and address that. What happened there? - Right, so when we started digging into our Variable Peak Pricing Program through the workbench and looking at when customers were using energy, we noticed around $900 we had customers were doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing during a time-based rate. So they were behaving completely the wrong way. And that was super surprising for us. I think two things, right? Enrollment in the rate alone does not mean behavior is going to change. And second, really, if we want these customers to deliver real value for customers and for the business, we have to better understand who needs the right, like who needs the support, who needs the coaching, what they might be misunderstanding, what kind of messages will help make them take the action that we need them to. Through this discovery, right, once we identified these users, we moved away from the broad, generic messaging just around, hey, shift your energy use outside these peak hours. And we moved to some pretty targeted messaging. The team did an incredible job building out new visuals, showing these customers, you're doing the exact opposite of what you need to, and that's impacting your bill amount, right? Like their energy use went up between our peak hours of two to seven. And with some, you know, very nice nudges, right? We don't want to be punitive. We don't want to come down on the customer, but we, we need to partner with the customer. We need them to, you know, help reduce peak demand. They were able to see a shift from, it was 70% reduction in that peak energy use, which was around nine megawatts of a swing. So all of that was driven by low cost efforts, taking a look at the data, taking a look at what the customers are doing, how they're behaving, targeting those customers with the right messaging, simple, easy to understand, coaching them. And we saw quite a bit of success there. - Tell me about what you unlock with these specific personalized messages relative to more generic messaging, conserving energy, for example, at peak hours. - I think it's about two things. So one is fairness on who is causing how much of burden on the grid. And so the cost of the grid is passed in a certain fair manner. The second one is consumer behavior. A majority class of the customers, a financial incentive is what moves the needle, right? I mean, I'm sure there are environments environmentalists and their other stuff but ultimately it's the bill that matters to the vast majority of people and energy rates offer a chance for people to to consume energy in a way that is that reduces the grid load and in turn reduces their own bill so it's a win-win situation see for example if i have an eb um i don't come out and tell everything about my house to my utility company like i don't come and say hey i just bought an eb hey i just charged my eb at this time or i just put in this appliance or i bought a new uh i put new soul on my roof so what happens is the ability to understand the customers without having them come and tell everything about their life to the utility is the step number one which allows us to identify and profile each customer so that we can serve them personally for example there's a profile of a customer who who is like total prosumer has a solar has eb thinking about putting the battery is on the most complex rate plan etc etc which is very different from the profile of a customer who probably is in the low income is living in a very old house has a like a 25 year old air conditioner which needs maintenance the weatherization of the building is losing energy in heating and cooling times very different profiles right how do you how do you know so first of all the technology allows us to understand each customer's both behavior appliances home home envelope so that we can say who which customer needs help where and then matching the different offers and rebates and programs that let's say ogeny has created for their customers matching each customer with the right rebate for example a low income customer has a very strong weatherization rebate available but people are not aware by us being able to say hey this customer is most likely in the low and medium income category and they have a very bad weatherization envelope and then reaching out to them with an ro equation to say hey you may only spend three hundred dollars out of your pocket but seven hundred dollars are going to be paid by the utility and by the way within eight months you will start saving a lot more money yeah absolutely and kirby i'm assuming that this makes your job easier more interesting i think going back to the point about the anxiety a lot of customers feel this is really important for people feeling like the utility has their back that they're giving them good advice how does this change the relationship with the customer so they feel like you're behind them helping them out this helps our customer relationship because again it builds trust right it's building trust because we're providing them with relevant transparent information and i think historically the relationship between your utility was receiving a bill or if you had an outage or if there was a problem right and now we need our customers just as much as they need the essential service of power and we can't just all of a sudden ask our customers to participate in these demand response programs right we need to build a relationship with them to help them understand how and why one thing we want to do is we want to our customers to see over time is when they make these improvements when they make these adjustments when they sign up for our programs receive our rebates they see the improvement over time they're seeing last summer during similar weather right this is what how much energy you use but because you got a tune up for your air conditioning unit or you started on a time-based rate and added a smart thermostat you saw your costs go down your consumption go down because you did those things and took those actions but i'd say the vast majority of customers don't want to spend the time to tell us but they like that we know and they like that we're offering them the product or service so it comes back to that customer expectation that they are experiencing personalization every single day every time they pick up their phone and they're expecting that from their utility now kirby how is og any factoring in these insights into your demand response strategy vpps your your integrated resource plan what can you now do that you might not have been able to do otherwise well from an irp perspective right from an integrated resource perspective demand response is our you know demand side resources are only as good if they're dependable right they only have value if we can depend on them and the insights that we're getting are helping us think about how we need to structure our demand response programs in the future it's a customer partnership and so the better understanding we can understand the data and which customers can participate the more confidently we can use that in our planning in our resource planning and moving forward and so there's this interesting nexus now abate between like the customer experience utility planning and ultimately grid operations how are those things all converging they are converging because of the need need of the hour right i mean for example we know that the demand on the grid cannot be fulfilled by putting in infinite resources because those resources then end up making the energy unaffordable right so we switch our attention back to customers saying hey we know there's a lot of flexible demand or load flexibility in how people use it and what appliances especially prosumer you see when i'm running my ac for the most part i have to run ac when i'm at home and it's very hot right you can you can influence 10 15 percent through demand response on the hot days but when you start looking at the new consumption patterns electric vehicles i can choose to charge it at different times in the day and that becomes a huge load flexibility so i would say we turn back towards consumers to help the grid in the meantime so while it will take almost a decade to both up level the grid capacity right because we just made that statement that we need consumers to manage our grid this point and we can't just go and ask them to say hey do this they have to be your partner which means this has to be development of trust development of relationship but we need consumers for the next i would say at least five to ten years to give us that buffer in building that grid and that's where this whole virtual power plant the demand response and terms become super important i loved your point about flexibility and i think from our standpoint right it's not about us like shifting the burden onto the customer to help us solve this problem it's about educating them giving them more control giving the flexibility helping them sign up in those programs to meet their lifestyle so they can see those the values that they have and value and the customer benefits it all it also is benefiting us right and it's a benefiting affordability keeping costs low for all and i wanted to make that point you know we don't want to just say oh we need our customers and we need you to do this and stepping away from the responsibility that we are continuing to grow and build generation those things don't happen overnight right so we're seeing this incredible demand right so we're seeing this incredible demand to serve and og and e is very very clear we want to protect our customers from the cost to serve the large data center customers and we have a lot of requirements related to that and we believe if done the right way those large data centers can actually help with affordability um so it all complements affordability and helping our customers understand that they have a a seat at the table and they're going to be able to do that and they're going to be able to do that and and they're going to be able to do that and they're going to be able to do that and they're going to be able to do that and to impact affordability the final question for both of you um kirby i'll start with you if you were sitting down with other people in charge of customer experience at other utilities like what is the the lesson you would share from your approach i would say that customer experience really needs to be connected to that core utility strategy and it's not just a communications function anymore right um if the utility strategy is not just a communications function anymore the utility is facing growth which everybody is affordability pressures increased electrification our customer strategy really matters and if you do it right and have the right partnership with your customers you can do it in a way that keeps affordability right reliability um as the key value that you can provide as a utility yeah abe what do you think are the big takeaways from og and e's story and experience um i think first of all og has been very forward looking in adoption of technology i think og has been an early adopter uh there number one without without taking unreasonable risks so first of all very important right i mean when the technologies are proven they were out there testing and then putting it there second most important thing that i would share from the experience of og with everybody in the industry you don't just buy technology and it works you need to actually have people who spend a lot of money on it and you need to have people who spend a lot of money on it time on that. So, for example, Kirby and their team had literally just one or two dedicated people who were who became experts on understanding the intelligence and that's when they were able to realize those use cases of nine megawatt peak load reduction because somebody was using the tool so i call it adoption of the tool and using it is the second step which is very important they did it fantastic uh and that's my lesson to everybody invest in the new technology but then also invest in the change management and the usage of the technology to actually get to outcomes such a fascinating moment for the industry abegupta from bidgely thank you so much thank you stephan kirby brinley from og and e thank you thank you kirby brinley is the director of customer experience at oklahoma gas and electric abegupta is the founder and ceo of oklahoma gas and electric abegupta and ceo of bidgely this is the third episode in our four-part series with bidgely on how utilities are using ai to understand customers plan for growth and manage a more dynamic grid you can find the full series and more information about bidgely in the show notes