Alinta Energy to be transparent with AI

Alinta Energy has said while consumers are “pretty excited” about AI, there is still distrust around the technology.

Cindy Vandecasteele, general manager for customer engagement, and retail markets at Alinta Energy told a Genesys Xperience Sydney crowd that trust amongst its Australian customers is low compared to other parts of the globe.

“A lot of our customers are pretty excited about AI, but a lot of them still have that low trust and I've come across research recently around, in Australia, being fairly low compared to other countries across the globe.

“I don't want to be too controversial. I absolutely subscribe to the strategic imperative around AI.

“This whole thing around building trust is being able to just go slowly and that's with internal stakeholders, as well as customers and agents and just being very transparent.

Vandecasteele said the Australian electricity and gas retailing private company, owned by Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Enterprises (CTFE), must follow tight regulations.

“We're so highly regulated, we would not be able to do it any other way. It's very much ingrained in our in the way we do things.”

In the talk, Vandecasteele said the company has an AI company based around the “accuracy of AI, biases and discrimination”.

“Then we have our IT governance framework, which incorporates AI and so it's information governance committee and then around our firm constraints.

“Then we've got all the other stakeholders, risk legal compliance and then working with our QA teams once things are live to make sure that the quality of every interaction continues to be assured.”

Vandecasteele said the company has spotted a few potential use cases for AI.

“First of around customer and growth, so deeper customer insights better, trends forward, forward.

“Looking in terms of what our customers need and want and then going into that productive engagement, so the next best action for active preventative turn”.

“Then we're on a very ambitious digital deflection agenda. We're already seeing a lot of good results there.

“We've recently deployed web messaging and our first bot, how we scale that is super important.”

Vandecasteele added the business has a lot of customers engaging digitally “and we want to keep them there.”

Also, supporting its customer service agents it’s another area with the company Alinta Energy “already digitally deflected” various enquires.