Utilities Shift to Connected Ecosystems with Vertical
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- J.D. Power's 2026 Utilities Outlook reports average monthly residential electricity bills above $189, a 34% increase since 2020, with customer satisfaction at a record low, leaving utilities with little room to sequence improvements.
- SEW.AI's research across 470+ utility partnerships identifies Customer + Workforce + Grid 360° synergy as a leading transformation priority, with more than two-thirds of utility executives preferring industry-specific Vertical AI over horizontal models.
- Omaha Public Power District, serving more than 893,000 residents across 13 Nebraska counties, integrated customer experience, field operations, outage management, asset information, scheduling, dispatch and enterprise systems into a coordinated operating environment spanning a 5,000-square-mile service territory.
- Southwest Gas Corporation, serving more than 2 million customers across Arizona, Nevada and California, introduced Tech-En-Route for uber-like real-time technician tracking and unified its customer-facing and field workflows into a single service model.
- Utilities that proactively communicate during outages score 52 points higher in customer satisfaction, while those that proactively communicate infrastructure investment updates score 82 points higher, per J.D. Power.
- SEW.AI launched COSMOS, describing it as the industry's first AI-native platform for energy and utilities, unifying customer experience, workforce experience, business operations and grid intelligence on a single cloud-native foundation.
Why it matters: With two-thirds of utility executives already preferring Vertical AI and residential bills up 34% since 2020, procurement weight is tilting away from generic horizontal models toward industry-specific platforms. The 82-point customer-satisfaction gap for utilities that proactively communicate infrastructure investment shows the financial case for integration is no longer theoretical.
