Centrica and KPMG: Bigger, Bolder, Faster and Driven by AI

At Centrica, James Boswell is Director of Cloud, and enthusiastically embraces the mantra of ‘bigger, bolder, faster and driven by AI’.  

“My manager, Darren Miles (Group CIO) is always saying, I've got the most exciting job in the company,” explains James. “It's because the cloud changes and transforms the way we can work. It makes us quicker. It makes us more agile. We can respond to market conditions very quickly.”

James speaks with genuine passion about the current opportunities AI and cloud are presenting to the business and the value these technologies are helping it pass on to employees and customers. He sees these technologies as crucial for current progress and as gateways to significant future improvements.

James has watched the potential of AI blossom over the last two decades, as he looks back to studying computer science at Reading University in the UK. From those early days, his career has gone full circle from those early modules in AI, to arriving at Centrica on the service desk, before stepping through the ranks to his current role at a company steeped in history.

“The cloud is where cutting-edge technology like AI is first introduced. It gives Centrica so many different options with different providers, solutions and services,” he explains. 

“We can build and generate products that our customers need and want, as well as evolving our operations to help us improve our customer service. For example, by giving our agents and contact centres the right tools and technology to deliver great customer service in the moment.”

Centrica’s digital history

At Centrica, being on a journey of digital transformation has become the status quo for almost a decade. This has enabled the business to not only catch up on technological areas in which it was lagging, but to forge ahead in the market. Centrica is now laying out its roadmap for supercharging AI augmentation across the business in the coming 12-18 months, all in service of its goals of net zero as a company by 2045 and for its customers by 2050.

“Centrica is a 200-year-old company. It's been around for a long time,” he says.

“Technology has not always been our strongest point, but we're moving to become more tech-led and use technology to our advantage, making us quicker, and focusing on customer service and getting the most value for our customers by using technology in the best possible way.”

Centrica dates back to 1812 with the founding of the Gas Light and Coke Company, the world’s first public utility. The UK gas industry grew over the years, culminating in the formation of British Gas Corporation in 1973. After British Gas was privatised in 1986, Centrica emerged in 1997 following the demerger of British Gas into three entities: Centrica, BG Group and Transco. 

Retaining the British Gas brand, Centrica focused on energy supply and services and is today a leading UK energy provider, expanding into renewable energy and other related services. Centrica has been on a modernisation journey, with its Hive IoT remote thermostat platform, moving to SaaS-based customer service tools and using data and AI to reduce complaints by 28%.  

Centrica’s AI Journey ahead

The days of being slow to adopt new technology are clearly in the past for Centrica, as it pivots towards a more tech-led approach. “We use cloud extensively across Centrica to manage customer interactions and ensure we're using scalable products that can quickly adapt to our evolving services.”

“We're using technology to reimagine our end-to-end operations as a company,” explains James. “We’re looking at processes that have been in place for a long time and seeing what can be automated or augmented, and how we can help all of our colleagues, across a huge variety of roles, become more efficient and to work in a smarter way.

Critical to the implementation of this ‘bigger, bolder, faster’ approach has been prioritising the right areas to invest, and which opportunities present the greatest potential for impact. Crucial to this has been the Centrica collaboration with KPMG. KPMG helped Centrica to take a data-led approach to exploring productivity and the opportunity for AI across the workforce, allowing them to make informed decisions about where to invest. 

“This research, using a combination of key business KPIs, combined with rich data on our ways of working from Viva Insights, has helped us to define a clear set of priorities to drive performance. Taking a data-led approach means we also now have a baseline, making it possible for us to track our progress and using experiments to test and learn where we are truly having an impact.”   

He considered the alliance to be a ‘natural fit’, given the long standing relationship between KPMG & Centrica, as well as KPMG’s strong alliance with Microsoft. “We have worked with KPMG for many years on many different projects,” says James. “One of the most important things in a partner is that we have a team that works well with us. They're aligned to our core goal and mission.” 

Experimentation to prove value

Centrica has used an experimentation-led approach to test the value of various AI products within their organisation before deciding where to scale. One example of this has been a pilot programme for Microsoft Copilot, rolling out to a select group of 300 colleagues across their Group Functions. The aim was to identify areas of greatest benefit, such as efficiency, quality, compliance, inclusivity and improved employee experience. 

As James highlights, the analysis conducted by KPMG has been instrumental in helping Centrica assess the potential value from Microsoft Copilot across the different business areas, in addition to the learnings from their Early Access Programme. “They've helped us determine which parts of the business would benefit most from the product and where we'd see the best return on investment.”

This bottom-up insight was supported by a report from the KPMG Workforce. AI model, which takes an outside-in view of long-term potential from AI in different areas of the business. By breaking down the organisation into jobs and tasks, and looking at the augmentation potential for these tasks, this enabled Centrica to predict priority use cases and opportunity from a product which has not been in the market long enough for a ‘traditional’ business case approach.

“Now we are clearer on the opportunity, the key to success is in how we drive an effective implementation, including with the right cultural change, to genuinely realise the benefits we are modelling.” James says. “We are investing in our capabilities and tools to support effective digital adoption, including a behavioural science backed approach and reinvigorating our network of more than 250 digital champions that have led the charge on earlier enterprise technology programmes.”

The benefits to Centrica

The benefits of their AI journey are already being felt at Centrica.

“The foundational benefits are really around productivity and smarter working,” adds James. “Some of the impacts are in micro behaviours which drive frustration and loss of valuable time. For example, we can see a huge volume of time is spent in meetings, and lots of time is spent on meeting administration. Now, minutes get transcribed instantly after the meeting, and they can read the action straight away. And if you didn’t make it to the meeting, you can get an instant recap.”

“Other benefits are more transformational for a specific area of our value chain. For example, we are using AWS Connect to manage customer contact and drive improved customer satisfaction. AI is allowing us to live transcribe calls, view live sentiment analysis and complete autowrap, without adding to the load of our front line colleagues.”

These are just examples. James reels off a list of success stories Centrica is already delivering: each one helping to augment the productivity of colleagues and supporting improved customer experiences. 

“Overall, it is about making our colleagues and customers’ lives simpler and with less friction, whilst increasing their digital literacy at the same time,” says James.

It is the quality of planning, and the detailed focus on the ‘human side’ of the transformation, that comes through as a critical piece of the AI jigsaw puzzle.  

Lessons in AI adoption

For other organisations following their own AI journeys, James says that his team has learned a huge number of lessons during Centrica’s transformation so far. 

One significant lesson is who should be used to test out technology and new processes.  

“Don't just give it to people in the IT department,” adds James. “That's not the best idea. Give it to the right people to test and learn, including those with high and low digital confidence, and make sure that they get the right amount of training and support. This is how you can learn what a scaled roll-out might deliver.”

“One of our best investments was time spent on hackathons to help us engage different groups and co-create value opportunities, whilst also getting people excited about AI.”

He is quick to emphasise the adoption of new systems and AI capabilities is not just a technological problem, but a human one. 

“For IT departments, it’s important to work hand in hand with HR and Leadership on the culture of the company. It’s one thing giving people a tool, but if you don't have a culture that embraces the use of that technology and new ways of working, you're not going to get very far,” he adds.  

Lucy Pringle, Employee Experience Lead at KPMG agrees with this sentiment and adds the importance of change leadership.

“You cannot reap the benefits of AI without changes from your workforce. In many cases, you are looking to break down and reconfigure years, or decades, of engrained workplace habits to form new behaviours. This makes the success of the AI revolution primarily a behavioural and cultural challenge,” adds Lucy. “It requires proper investment, time and resources behind tailored change and adoption.”

“If you don't have your Exec bought in and leading from the top, it's not going to flow down to the rest of the company. And if you haven't got your early career employees embracing it from the bottom, it's not going to flow up.” 

“An AI roadmap should be built on principles around experimentation and willingness to pivot as you take learnings from what you do,” she adds. “You might start something with one product and move to another. You need to be thinking about that cross-vendor strategy and how different platforms and tools work together, and then thinking about the impact of all of those decisions on a connected user experience.”

Aside from the importance of change, James emphasises the importance of getting ahead on data governance, quality and security early. “There are many complexities and challenges to be addressed in this space, such as managing access to and use of personally identifiable information and ensuring solid processes are placed to ensure all security and compliance requirements are met. Doing this in advance allowed us to run more quickly with proof of concepts and made sure we weren’t delayed at go-live.” 

Finally, as Centrica looks to its tech-lead future, James is adamant the company’s approach to partnerships with organisations like KPMG, as well as strong collaboration with their primary vendors including Microsoft, AWS and Salesforce, is crucial to delivering a return on investment for the business, its employees and all of its customers. 

“It’s incredibly important we have the right partners that are in it for us and not just doing it for themselves,” says James.