Is demand-side flexibility crucial for the energy transition? Global Director of Markets – Kraken, Charlotte Johnson
In this episode, Adam is joined by Global Director of Markets at Kraken, Charlotte Johnson. They delve into Kraken’s rapid growth from a software-first platform to a global leader in energy tech, licensing its solutions to utilities globally. Charlotte sheds light on the unique challenges of scaling intermittent renewables, improving grid infrastructure, and managing the complexities of residential and grid-scale assets. Together, they explore the evolving role of demand-side flexibility in accelerating the energy transition.
Charlotte shares insights into Kraken’s push for industry-wide data standardisation and its use of AI to transform customer interactions, optimise fleets and streamline onboarding processes.
The discussion expands on Kraken’s mission to use technology to make the energy transition faster and cheaper, with a focus on integrating consumer devices like EVs, heat pumps and home batteries into managed programs. Charlotte reveals how Kraken’s innovative culture, supported by initiatives like “family dinner” sessions and embedded data science teams, enables the company to adapt quickly to the evolving energy technology landscape. For the tech enthusiasts, the episode dives into Kraken’s use of tools like its “Snap” model for asset optimisation and its approach to mixed-integer linear programming.
Adam and Charlotte explore:
- The role of demand-side flexibility
- Kraken’s mission, growth and new innovations
- Complexities of managing grid-scale and residential assets, and the push for industrywide standardisation
- Kraken’s approach to embedding AI across its operations and the broader challenges and opportunities in energy tech.
The weekly Hypercube podcast sits down with leaders in the energy and utilities sectors to explore how data analytics can help businesses make smarter decisions and accelerate business growth.
CHAPTER MARKERS
Chapter markers
00:17 Meet Charlotte Johnson from Kraken
00:30 Understanding the role of Global Director of Markets
00:45 Monetising distributed energy resources
02:12 Career path and skills for the energy sector
04:29 Kraken and Octopus energy relationship
08:31 Data challenges in energy flexibility
17:19 The role of demand side in energy transition
25:38 Tech culture and AI at Kraken
32:27 Closing remarks and future prospects
TRANSCRIPT
Hypercube Podcast Transcript
Title: Is demand-side flexibility crucial for the energy transition?
Host: Adam Sroka
Guest: Charlotte Johnson
Adam Sroka: Welcome to the Hypercube podcast, where energy trading and utility leaders share insights on data, AI, and cutting edge tech. I’m your host, Adam Sroka, CEO and founder of Hypercube, technology partner for the energy sector. Let’s get into today’s episode. Hello, and welcome back to the Hypercube podcast.
I’m delighted today to be joined by Charlotte Johnson from Kraken. Charlotte, welcome to the show. Would you like to introduce yourself for the audience?
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah, thank you for inviting me. So I’m Charlotte and I’m Global Director of Markets at Kraken.
Adam Sroka: That’s a big job title, isn’t it? Global Director of Markets.
What does that entail? What’s a day to day for you look like?
Charlotte Johnson: Great question. Very different. A lot of time spent with our customers, understanding how they use our platform, really focusing on how do we monetize different types of distributed energy resources. So whether that’s residential or grid scale across different markets, predominantly in the UK, but increasingly in the U S and also continental Europe.
And then looking at now we know how to fully monetize those assets in those different markets. How do we make sure that the assets actually have access to those markets? So there’s a big piece around policy and regulatory reform. That we need to focus on to actually make those assets, be able to participate in the markets that they can’t participate in today.
Adam Sroka: That sounds like an enormous job because it’s hard enough doing it one domain, but if you’re talking like continental Europe plus the U S does that, how does that scale? It’s like just loads of people running around reading documents, regulation, and trying to make decisions.
Charlotte Johnson: No, we’re a relatively light structure.
So we have people per geography. So there’s a policy regs person per region. And there’s also a market expert per region. And then we really leverage all the resources that already exist. So consultancies analytics companies, we’ve got subscriptions to different things. So we get data, we get research reports.
So I think it’s a combination of internal and external.
Adam Sroka: And so if someone was in the audience and thought, I want that as a job, I’d love to do that. How did, like, how did they get there? What was your career path like?
Charlotte Johnson: So my career, I started really focusing on climate modeling. So I had an analytical background.
So I was basically looking at how quickly is the Greenland ice sheet melting today versus when it melted about 400, 000 years ago. So I think that kind of analytical modeling skill applies quite nicely to lots of different industries, but in particular for energy, you can use that to then think about how do you model the value of electric vehicles or how do you optimize a system of renewables and demand side flexibility?
So I think there’s a big piece around the analytical side. Then I think the other the other thing that I always look for in people is that kind of curiosity to, to learn something new or a passion about the industry because. When you think about energy or you think about the transition, it’s evolving so quickly.
And there’s so many moving parts that no one is an expert in everything. So if you’re interested in learning something new and you can demonstrate that you can pick things up quickly, then there’s so many opportunities, I think, in the energy sector.
Adam Sroka: And I think, yeah, I found that there’s a lot of people in energy that do it because they love it and want to contribute.
And I find that if a company has a really good mission. Then you can attract some amazing, like super talent people, but a lot less than they might go and get at like Amazon or a big bank or something like that. It’s quite a nice place to work in. Do you find that at Kraken?
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah, I think the mission bit’s really important.
So if you ask people in Kraken what the mission is, everyone will say it in their own words, but it all boils down to basically. How do we use technology to make the energy transition quicker and cheaper? So super simple, which is really easy for everyone to understand. And then we’re using that technology, not just to license it to Octopus Energy, to help them have better customer service and to onboard and integrate more renewables and demand side flex, but also to all of Octopus’s competitors.
So you’ve got that ability to work in a company that has such a huge. Potential to reach to reach a large part of the industry.
Adam Sroka: Yeah. And I guess for many of the UK audience, no one’s going to be unaware of octopus, but for those abroad, there may be some, maybe people aren’t familiar. Would you, could you expand a little bit on octopus and Kraken and the relationship?
It’s not super straightforward.
Charlotte Johnson: No, it’s not. So octopus energy group is the parent company. And then they’ve got four verticals or four groups. So you have the retail arm, which is your energy supply business. They’ve got, I think it’s over 11 million customers globally. They’re the largest retailer in the UK.
You have the generation business where they invest in renewables. And so they basically build renewables or manage renewables. You then have the service business, which is where they do the manufacturing of heat pumps. So they’ve launched their own heat pump because they identified that there, there wasn’t enough choice in heat pumps on the market.
They also lease electric vehicles and they do the Electroverse, which is the EV charging roaming out. And then the final kind of vertical is Kraken. So anything software tech related sits within Kraken. Within Kraken, we’ve got a few different products. The idea is we’re selling all of those products to the same end customer, which is a utility.
Usually vertically integrated utilities in the U. S. and in the U. K., large kind of utilities that have retail arms and generation arms. So the retail side being we offer a CRM and billing system and then also the residential EV control and optimization. So we’ve got a virtual power plant at the moment with Octopus Energy that’s got just over.
280, 000 EVs within that, which is huge. I think it’s over 25 percent of the EVs in the UK sit within that managed charging scheme, where we’re essentially deciding when to charge those vehicles. And then we’ve got the same kind of product on the grid scale side for storage and renewables.
Adam Sroka: Unbelievable. And it’s not been around for hundreds of years. It’s like quite a young business, right?
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah. So that the flexibility arm came. Into Kraken in 2020 from the business called Upside Energy, which I was part of. And then it is grown since then but Kraken came before Octopus, so Kraken was actually developed as the software platform.
And then octopus Energy was set up to basically test the software platform to to prove that it worked. And I think they managed to prove that It worked with just about,
Adam Sroka: yeah.
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah. Just about. And then it’s grown and it’s obviously been licensed to other people within the industry.
Adam Sroka: Yeah.
I just, it’s such an interesting, like the, yeah the cracking story when you read about a deep dive or watch the videos online, like it’s such an interesting story and it’s amazing to see it just play out. I think a lot of my chat recently is all about how so many people in the energy sector on people’s organization aren’t ready for.
Basic change of software really, and the kind of data that’s going to be required to, to leverage things like virtual power plants and even like EB schemes and things like that. Like they are really complicated digital products that you come and bring your kind of traditional Excel and email mindset to try and tackle it.
Yeah. I don’t think it will fall. It’s going to play out very well for a lot of the large incumbents. So it’s fascinating to watch in real time. someone take a completely different approach and be technology led.
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah, I think it’s a total transformation of the utility, not just with the technology, but also with the whole operating model of how they’re going to have to work going forward.
I think the two go hand in hand, but yeah, you’re right. It’s a totally new way of working for a lot of the utilities in the space today, I think.
Adam Sroka: And I, yeah, I was, I’m always guilty of that kind of forget that. Yeah. You’ve also got a layer on the operation side and the kind of business architecture to support.
Bit of a I like to ask people what are the biggest data challenges you have, but I think for an organization like Cracker, like you must have quite a few nice hairy problems.
Charlotte Johnson: Yes. So I think if we think about what we’re doing in the flexibility world, we want to be able to control and optimize assets and that asset can be a residential asset, or it could be a good scale asset.
And when we think about data, what we need is there’s probably three things. We want the right information from an asset or the right data. Data field from an asset, we want it in the right frequency and then we want it quick enough. So there’s a latency aspect to it. So those are the three things we care about most.
And if we think about grid scale assets, we’ve actually done quite well, I think, as an industry with grid scale assets. And if you look at and we can talk about GB because I think they’ve got the fastest balancing services globally. We can get 20 Hertz readings from most of the batteries on our platform that are grid scale.
Which is 20 readings a second across an array of different fields. So it’s a large amount of data. I think we’re getting over 4 billion data points a day just from our front of the meter assets, which is huge. There are still challenges in that every OEM gives us the data in a slightly different way. So it’s not standardized, but that’s manageable.
We can solve that. That’s a software problem. So that’s on the grid scale side on the residential side. It’s like you move to a different world. So smart meter data is half hourly and you get it the day after, which is very different to that 20 seconds real time. And then if you think about EVs.
Every, every manufacturer is slightly different in how they present data to us and what they do and don’t give us and in what frequency or latency. OEMs are like notoriously hard to integrate with and get the data in the right format that we want. I think that’s where the biggest challenge is and which is why at the moment we’re really pushing to not necessarily for new protocols or standards, but some kind of convergence in.
There’s so many standards that already exist, but how does the industry actually converge and to start doing something so that there’s standardization across the OEMs. I think on the market side, so that’s the asset side, on the market side. Niso is a really good example of trying to make data more transparent and more open.
When you think about the UK market, there’s so many companies that have built leaderboards off Niso’s data, which in a lot of countries isn’t possible because you just can’t get access to that data. In Texas, it takes 60 days to get the data from the actual assets of what they’ve bid into the market.
And in some countries you can’t get it at all. So I think we’ve come a long way, but there’s definitely more to do on the residential side. And there’s more to do in the UK with transparency of data, but particularly actually beyond the UK with market data.
Adam Sroka: Yeah. And I, we’ve some experience building tech solutions for a residential flexibility provider and even the assets themselves, right?
Require Modbus or the actual in the residential space. I think you’ve got a far greater number of suppliers. The standardization gets even worse. It’s good to see the announcement by out there, the new standards. Yeah.
Charlotte Johnson: Mercury. Yeah, I think
Adam Sroka: that’s really cool. And I’d love to see, I hope it gets traction.
It’s the kind of thing that only a Kraken could probably do. And so I hope people do get behind it.
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah. And we’ve had an awful lot of interest since launching that. I think it’s going to really help, particularly on, like you said, on the residential side to move things forward.
Adam Sroka: No, it’s really exciting to see.
I guess in like your role, then are you still doing a lot more, like you must have to do with a lot more ad hoc analysis, like weird and wonderful data sources, like reports and white papers. Is that how a market analysis still works? Let’s go.
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah. So it’s still very. Very data heavy, very data focused.
Everything that we’re doing within the company is trying to use data to either provide a better customer service to our consumers or to better inform our models or the platform that we’ve got, so very data heavy. A lot of it for me personally is looking at the business case or the value for those assets.
So for me, market data is really important and then asset data. So understanding actually how our assets performing is really easy to say. You can make this amount of money in the market and we ask the asset to do X, Y, Z, but it doesn’t necessarily, all assets perform slightly differently. And how a Tesla car responds is very different to how another car might respond.
So looking at actually that across our portfolio is really important.
Adam Sroka: And so if you could wave a magic wand, or let’s say you were running a small sort of data consultancy and you could focus on any one new product, like forecast or a data set. What would you dream of?
Charlotte Johnson: Okay. So I’m probably a bit biased at the moment cause I’m spending a lot of time on the grid scale side. And I think what’s really interesting is the physical optimization side of it. So I know a lot of people focus on the financial optimization of how do you monetize the asset across the different markets and being in the right market at the right time sort of thing.
I think there’s also a massive piece of value or a massive amount of value to be unlocked through better understanding your state of charge of the battery, the temperature. Once you can understand those two things and pull that into the financial optimization, that physical, the physical optimization bit, which sits below it.
Is what really will drive a lot of value in a saturated world. And we’ve seen across our platform, state of charge readings being totally different from different assets, different age of assets, when they’re out, they can be like over 25 percent out, like you’re out. And if you’re trading that asset, that’s a big, it’s a big difference.
The same with temperature. If you can better understand the temperature of your asset and how it then informs how quickly it charges or discharges. That’s important at different state of charges.
Adam Sroka: Change gear a little bit for the the data and tech nerds in the audience. What tools are you using day to do your analysis?
Charlotte Johnson: We have built, most of our models are in house. We use we have the one that we use the most frequently is our model called snap named after a song. Yeah, about power I’ll have to find it, but it was catchy. No, it definitely was catchy. So our SNAP model is used to basically evaluate all opportunities for different asset types.
And it models on the time horizon of whatever the settlement period is across the different markets that there are taking into account the physical and the financial world. It’s a mixed integer linear programming model. And that’s the thing that is used every day. It’s also the bedrock for our wider core optimization module, which basically is part of the platform.
So it’s all fully integrated.
Adam Sroka: Yeah, everywhere. I’ve seen it done that, that’s the kind of foundation tool set. And I think it’s it’s always interesting to see the implementation because yeah, mixed interlinear programming, it brings a certain type of requirement to the skillset and a certain flavor of people that I think a lot of traditional software don’t up with or don’t get.
And they’re trying to make the two worlds meet, play nicely as is in my experience, been quite a challenge, actually. How do you find, I guess you’re quite a way on the journey and if it’s such a core part of what you do, that must be quite a well integrated team.
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah, I think it’s also probably important to know how we’re Our data scientists or data people are split across all teams, so we don’t have a separate just data team that work on models.
Every tech team will have data scientists embedded within that, so it sits throughout the organization. Which is potentially a different structure to how other companies might do it. Yeah.
Adam Sroka: And the, like some of the emerging chat around like optimal organization structures for things like data, that’s quite mature, but that did federated spread that knowledge out and try and raise the level of understanding of everyone.
What do you think then are the like core challenges that we’re going to face over the next few years? And I what, where is Kraken turning its attention or its focus?
Charlotte Johnson: I think the biggest thing that we’re thinking about at the moment is the role of the demand side in the transition, because everyone’s focusing on the renewables growth in the industry, which is key, you can’t do the transition without tripling renewables by 2030.
I don’t think anyone’s disputing that. And with that, you’ve got to really think about the infrastructure, the network and grid connections and processes, planning, reform, all that stuff has to come together and happen. But the bit that I think from a technology point that we’re really focused on is how do you then integrate that level or that volume of intermittent renewable generation onto the system?
And you can’t do that without the demand side playing a huge role. So it’s how do you engage that demand side? And that’s where the consumer becomes really important. Because if you look at projections in the UK from NISO, I think their future energy pathway suggests that a third of all flexibility or low carbon dispatchable capacity will come from the consumer.
It’s 50 to 60 gigawatts. If you do the same analysis in the US, they’ve got a similar kind of ratio, although significantly higher volumes or flexibility that they need, but you can’t do, without a doubt, you can’t do the low carbon dispatchable bit without the consumer. So how do you engage the consumer within this, I think is the biggest challenge that we’re going to have.
And that’s where what we’re doing at Kraken becomes really important. So taking consumer devices like electric vehicles or heat pumps or home batteries and putting them into a managed program where we can take control of them. And we ask the customer for some set preferences of how warm do you want your home at different times?
What time do you want your car charged by and on what state of charge? We can then take those customer preferences and marry or match them against the system and optimize them against the market. And I think that’s the, that, that’s the piece of the jigsaw or piece of the puzzle that needs to come together to actually get us or accelerate the energy transition.
And I don’t think enough people are thinking about it or talking about it at the moment.
Adam Sroka: I totally agree because it’s very tempting, I think, in the energy industry to just think, oh, batteries and storage, we just save it and that’ll fix it all. But actually. There’s such an untapped market there and the opinion, like the long term growth of consumer demand is, it’s just going to keep increasing.
We’re going to keep having more and more assets in the home that can do more. Especially if we go to the electrification of people, we’re going to massively increase the load on homes. Then you add in the electrification of transport and the electrical needs of each individual household or whatever, it’s going to be so much higher.
But then. It’s a really difficult thing to manage because you’re asking people to make behavioral changes that never goes well, or you’ve got really stringent regulatory requirements, as well as the tech barriers of managing all these suppliers and things. When we look at the startup space is really interesting.
There’s loads of companies popping up, trying to tackle it. I think I’m optimistic about where we’ll go, but I think we’re going to see a lot of sort of ups and downs on that journey as we start to try and at least crack that problem.
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah. And I think the one thing that we probably haven’t talked about is most customers don’t really like their utility or the energy supplier.
Not many would trust them or have a good relationship with them. So to then give them your brand new heat pump or EV to take control of is a huge ask when we think about where energy suppliers are today and where consumer or customer perception is of energy suppliers are today. And that gap has to be closed because yeah, like you said, you’re asking a customer to, to give something up.
I think though, we try and think about it less about giving something up because if a customer has the ability to set preferences of, my car will be ready by 7am and it has to be 100 percent state of charge. We have to make that preference happen. What you’ve got, though, is from when they plug in at 5pm or 6pm the day before, you’ve got a 12 hour or 13 hour window for us to pick the cheapest time on the grid to, or the greenest time on the grid to charge that vehicle still within the constraints of what the customer wants.
So there’s a way the two can be matched together, but the customer also obviously has to give up that control. Often what they want is they will give up the control knowing that one, if there’s something in it for them, so they’re going to get. Cheaper miles, they’re going to get cheap charging and two, they always have that ability or backstop to override if they ever need it.
And whether or not that’s used, I think we’ve looked across our fleet. It’s very rarely used that kind of bump charge or override, but knowing that it’s there for a customer is also really important.
Adam Sroka: Yeah. It’s like having the controls and you’re not relinquishing all the control to the energy supplier.
And you’ve got that even if you, yeah, you do never use it.
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah. So the majority of Athlete are electric vehicles because there’s obviously more of them and it’s more, those customers are more engaged with the transition in terms of allowing people to do different things with them or.
experiment with different charging programs. We have integrated with heat pumps. So I would say we’re at the beginning of that journey and we’ll, we can happy to keep you updated on how that goes, but the integration part is key because a lot of heat pumps actually on the market don’t necessarily have a control element to it.
So it’s actually very difficult to even take control of them. And then, yes, like you said, once you’ve got that control, it’s really important that you think about the whole kind of thermal envelope of the house. And how do you match that with the customer preferences, which is a little bit harder than just taking an EV and turning it on and off and still being able to charge it by 7am to whatever state of charge we’ve said that we want to get it to for the customer.
Adam Sroka: The thing I see a lot of in the investor space is the excitement around virtual power plants. From the other side of the fence, having built what the advice or what were your sort of thoughts on that being a direction of travel for the new start ups?
Charlotte Johnson: It’s a really good question. I think there’s a lot of value in the VPP world, but I would.
I think what’s more important is how it all comes together for a utility or an energy supplier. They’ll need at some point, if you’re talking about a virtual power plants, that ability to aggregate assets and optimize them, you also need a way to control them. And that often sits in the DERMS platform.
And then you’ll also need a way to settle a report on them. And that sits in the kind of DER analytics platform. What I think is important is, Do you go to three separate vendors for all of those things, or do you have a platform that’s actually fully integrated end to end and can do all of them?
And I think that’s the bit that’s really key because that should ultimately be a better customer experience because if something goes wrong, it’s easier to identify where it’s gone wrong. And you’ve got less integrations and less risk.
Adam Sroka: And I’d have a bit like having done one. It’s Yeah.
Again, another thing that I think is underestimated in the complexity. And especially as you’ve got a couple of the development and your understanding of what you’re trying to do with constant changing markets and the pace of technology and like this, yeah, that. Prices in Chinese batteries going to the floor and all these just constant barrage of change and you’re trying to build something, it’s giving your customers confidence that you’ve got control and you’ve got foresight of what’s going to happen and it’s going to be well managed and not steal their data and serve their competitors.
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah. And I think it comes back to, it’s, it is when you’re talking about software systems of that kind of size and scale of controlling, hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of assets. It comes back down to that business transformation piece. Yeah. It’s not a simple solution. It’s enterprise software.
Adam Sroka: And so that yeah, Kraken’s a very techie business very mature, delivering loads of complicated stuff. Is there anything special about the kind of tech culture at Kraken or the business culture in general that makes that you’re obviously doing something right?
Charlotte Johnson: And it’s also really important that you keep that culture as you grow.
So we were, I think, in 20 when I joined the company in 2017, 2018, Upside was 15 people. When we joined Kraken, I think they were a few hundred people in 2020. And now we’re 1800 people. So just low 2000s. It’s a large company globally. The culture is really important and I think the company has a great culture.
So every week we have something called family dinner at 4. 15. I was very confused at first. It doesn’t include any dinner at all. It’s a four 15 till five o’clock meeting where which works very nicely, but basically everyone in the company comes together onto a zoom call. There’s also opportunities to do it in person in different offices and they’ll set up a big projector screen.
And we’ll go through the company and different business lines, product lines, teams have the opportunity to basically do a few slides on what they’ve been working on or something new that they’ve launched or an initiative or a program. And it can be tech related, like it could be a feature, it could be a product, it could also be related to some, an event, a conference, a social, a get together, something that’s going on.
But that happens religiously every Friday, and that’s a really nice way of bringing everyone together and sharing what’s happening across the company. We’ve also got other meetings that, or ceremonies that work around showcasing Things in more detail that might be an hour or two long where you can go into something really specific.
And then there’s also the ability for people to move across across teams. So there’s lots of circumvents that happen or people will work in different teams for a period of time to build something, then they’ll come back into a different team. So there’s a lot of opportunities for people to move across the business and there’s a lot of opportunities to share what’s happening.
Through the business. So we definitely feel like although it’s a grow, a rapidly growing organization, you’ve got a good handle on what’s still happening across the organization.
Adam Sroka: That’s amazing. Yeah. And I think it’s so easy to get lost or end up in silos or when you’re working on so much different stuff globally distributed.
So yes yeah, just a couple more questions on maybe the tech front. What about. What’s going on in technology that you’re excited about outside of like energy tech, but just tech in general, anything you’re hopeful for or any hot take?
Charlotte Johnson: I would say one of the things that we are starting to do more and more with is is AI, which is probably not surprising in different parts of the business.
So on the CRM and billing side, over a year ago, they launched They launched a new product called Magic Ink, which essentially allows the energy specialists to respond to questions, but it will already be written for them and there’ll be a prompt there that’s AI driven. We’ve actually found through analysis that interestingly, customers are at I think it’s 15 to 20 percent happier.
When they receive AI generated messages, then that energy specialist ones and not in a bad way, just because it’s often quicker and it’s more empathetic or it’s in the tone of the customer because it will read up through their account and see all of their interactions and it will respond in a way that obviously behaviorally appeals to them.
We’ve got stuff happening on the CRM billing side, which is really exciting. We’re doing more on the fleet optimization side is what we call it. So that those 280, 000 devices that are in a power plant a virtual power plant, sorry. How do you understand the behaviors of all of those customers so that we can cluster them and we can optimize them?
It’s something that’s exciting and that will continue to grow. And then actually the other bit or initiative that I’m close to at the moment is thinking about the onboarding of sites. So if you’ve got grid scale sites or CNI sites, which as we talked about are often very complex there’s a lot of manual processes.
Every site is different. It doesn’t matter how many you do. It’s different because it might have a slightly different agreement or a requirement from NISO, or it might have a different active network management scheme from one of the DNOs. So that ability to curtail it at certain times of the day.
Yeah, all of that has to come together in. In a way that we can onboard sites quicker. So I think the AI space is really interesting and we’re finding certain applications across the business where we think that we can add value quickly through leveraging it.
Adam Sroka: So that like really interesting to hear.
Charlotte Johnson: Yeah. And I think it’s, I think it’s not just within, we can probably learn so much from other industries that are also leveraging AI. I was at a dinner the other month, and I think there was around 50 different companies around the table. And one of the questions we were asked, and we all had to stand up and answer was, is your company using AI today?
And if so, is it the beginning of the journey? Where are you on the journey? And I think 90, over 90 percent of people that, that answered were using AI today already. And these were from industries, nothing to do with energy. It was law firms, there were banks, there were investment, there were developers. Some traders, some utilities, but I think it also goes to show that there’s, we could probably learn and in hearing some of the examples of how people said they were using it you could definitely learn as well from other industries on how we could bring it into different parts of our operations.
Adam Sroka: I think it’s a rich, it’s literally the reason Hypercube exists. Cause I went from being a consultant in other industries to working with the army. Really deeply understanding like a specific part of the energy sector, realizing that it was quite behind on some of the cutting edge tech stuff. And there was a lot of value to be brought over.
No, I wholeheartedly agree. And I imagine that was very interesting discussion. Before we let anyone go, I always just to ask people would like to find out more about you or if you’ve got anything you’d like to promote or plug where should we be pointing them?
Charlotte Johnson: I am very active on LinkedIn, so usually respond on LinkedIn and also, The Kraken website we can pull things from there if people want to reach out.
But yeah, happy to talk to people on LinkedIn.
Adam Sroka: Amazing. But it’s been a pleasure. I’ll hold you to that follow up session once you’ve a bit further down the hip hop journey, as promised, leaving the conversation. But thank you very much.
Charlotte Johnson: Thank you for inviting me.
Adam Sroka: Thanks again to Charlotte Johnson for joining us on the show.
Just another brilliant example of what happens when businesses and organizations in the energy sector take an innovation first, strong engineering mindset to some of the challenges around net zero. It’s absolutely unbelievable what Kraken and Octopus have managed to do over the last 10 years. And I’m really excited to see what’s going to happen over the next.
How’s Mercury going to play out, what are they going to do with their virtual power bond, really exciting stuff. So absolute pleasure to have Charlotte on the show. And if you want to be on the show, or, other people that want to talk about all things, energy and data and the future of AI in the sector, then please give us a shout.
Thanks again for your time.
Do you have something to say about Energy and Data?
We always welcome new perspectives from leaders in the energy, trading and utilities sectors. If you fancy being a guest on the Hypercube podcast, drop us a message below and our team will be in touch.
