Building customer trust in 2025 now depends on adapting in real-time to ever‑shifting needs – and invisible intelligence is key.
Australian utilities sit at the intersection of cost‑of‑living stress, ambitious net‑zero obligations and rising customer expectations. Rebuilding – indeed expanding – public trust now depends less on new poles and wires than on smarter decisions made behind the scenes. Enter agentic AI – autonomous, self‑learning software agents that slot into existing systems, adapting in real-time to ever‑shifting operational and customer needs.
What is agentic AI – and why now?
Analysts expect the global AI market to rocket from US $5.2 billion in 2024 to US $196 billion by 2034, with a third of enterprise apps sporting agentic AI by 2028 and AI making 15 per cent of day‑to‑day decisions on its own.
Unlike rule‑bound bots, agentic AI can ‘think’ across workflows, adjusting strategies as new data arrives. EXL’s EXLerate.AI platform embodies this leap: cloud‑agnostic, open to third‑party models and designed to scale across legacy architectures without a ground‑up rebuild.
Building trust through proactive service
Agentic AI’s value becomes clear where trust is won or lost through billing accuracy, outage management or hardship support. EXLerate.AI automates end‑to‑end processes, aligning bills to actual usage, flagging unbilled accounts, optimising engineer visits and validating settlements – which all cut delays and human error while boosting efficiency by up to 45 per cent.
Because the platform ingests both EXL’s domain‑labelled datasets and external feeds, its large‑language models surface granular insights a call‑centre agent – or even a traditional analytics dashboard – would miss. The result is earlier hardship detection, context‑aware outreach and sentiment‑driven scripts that lift satisfaction and retention 15–20 per cent.
Compliance you can show your regulator
With the Australian Energy Regulator sharpening rules around vulnerability and ESG disclosure, transparency matters as much as performance. EXLerate.AI bakes governance into every step, logging each recommendation and action for a clear audit trail while monitoring model fairness and explainability. That gives boards, and watchdogs, confidence that autonomous decisions stay inside legal and ethical guardrails.
Proof in the pipeline
Two of the UK’s six largest energy providers already run EXLerate.AI. In manual‑heavy billing workflows, cycle times and errors fell sharply, unbilled accounts were resolved the first time, and engineer scheduling became friction‑free – delivering tangible savings, avoiding revenue leakage and, crucially, resulting in happier customers.
Why it matters for Australian utilities
From the Pilbara to Parramatta, utilities operate some of the world’s longest, most remote networks under exacting reliability targets. Data‑driven autonomy promises faster fault response, smarter asset dispatch and personalised customer care –building resilience and trust without ballooning headcount.
Agentic AI is fast becoming the foundation of smarter, more empathetic utility operations globally. For Australian utilities facing economic and customer challenges, adopting this technology paves the way to better service, compliance and trust.
To discover how agentic AI is transforming energy and infrastructure worldwide, download the full solution overview here
