en.Wedoany.com Reported - At the SAP for Energy & Utilities Conference held in Toulouse, France, artificial intelligence emerged as the core theme throughout the event. Over the three-day conference, energy industry experts focused on the real-world challenges of moving AI from proof of concept to large-scale deployment, covering multiple dimensions including data infrastructure, legacy system integration, regulatory compliance, and organizational transformation.
The energy industry is heavily investing in artificial intelligence to improve efficiency, unlock new business models, and drive the energy transition. However, the difficulty of advancing from pilot projects to full-scale implementation is often underestimated. Building a solid data foundation takes approximately six months, another twelve months are needed to see quantifiable returns on investment, and large-scale rollout may require an additional three years. Contributing factors include: unrealistic mapping of AI user experiences from simple daily tasks to complex enterprise environments; the difficulty of rapidly changing legacy system landscapes; the need to incorporate compliance requirements for regulated industries such as electricity, gas, and water into every architectural decision from the outset; a scarcity of AI professionals who combine business understanding with technical expertise; and organizational transformation, which remains a decisive success factor.
When scaling AI pilots across the entire organization, continuous consideration must be given to lifecycle management, identity and access management, security, compliance, governance, release management, testing, and continuous improvement. Andre Bechtold, President of SAP Industries & Experiences, stated that companies investing in the right foundation today will fully benefit from AI in the future. Torsten Welte, Head of SAP Energy & Natural Resources Industries, pointed out that business units need to understand technological possibilities, and IT departments must grasp business needs; AI is fundamentally transforming this industry.
The SAP Business Suite has natively embedded AI in the form of Joule, giving rise to specific application scenarios. In asset management and predictive maintenance, utility companies can proactively manage assets and grids before failures occur; the Utilities Customer Self-Service Agent enables 24/7 self-service and can reduce service costs by up to 90%.
The issue of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) received sustained attention at the conference. With millions of decentralized resources such as solar panels, electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps, and battery storage systems connecting to the grid, energy flows have shifted from unidirectional to bidirectional, with prosumers who generate their own power actively feeding electricity back into the grid. Coordinating the massive amounts of data generated by these assets has become a key challenge. The SAP Distributed Energy Resources solution integrates technical assets, commercial contracts, and customer data into a unified data model, laying the foundation for new business models such as smart tariffs, dynamic pricing, energy sharing, and demand response. Markus Bechmann, Global Vice President and Co-Head of the Industry Business Unit Utilities at SAP, stated that dynamic pricing and smart tariffs are already achievable business models, and energy providers now have the technological foundation to seize these opportunities.
To make AI tangible, the SAP Experience Center at the Walldorf Energy Park showcased real-world cases of its own energy transition implementation, including scenarios such as electric mobility, intelligent asset management, and energy communities. Information from the conference indicates that AI is no longer a future topic in the energy industry, but transitioning from pilots to company-wide transformation requires not only technological innovation but also a solid foundation in data, processes, and organization.
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