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Episode #167: 'From CRM to Energy Relationship Management and the Utility-Technology Relationship' with Kelly James, SVP and GM of Energy & Utilities at Salesforce [an Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast]

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Technology is revolutionizing the utility sector in more ways than meets the eye. While the first place for new technology that people look to is the physical grid or the sources of generation, in this episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast we dive into the role of technology in fostering transparency, efficiency, and trust within utilities. To assist in that conversation, we welcome in Kelly James, SVP and GM of Energy & Utilities at Salesforce. Kelly's extensive experience and insights shed light on the evolution of CRM to encompass energy relationship management to the integration of automation and AI for streamlining processes.

Listen in as Kelly provides to podcast host Jason Price and producer Matt Chester her invaluable perspectives on navigating the modern utility landscape. This thought-provoking conversation covers topics such as real-time sharing of insights among stakeholders, the impact of AI on utility operations, and the crucial theme of trust in technological advancements. Gain insights into the transformative journey of utilities and discover how technology is shaping the future of energy.

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Thanks to the sponsor of this episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast: Salesforce

 

Key Links:

Kelly James on Energy Central: https://energycentral.com/member/profile/kelly-james 

Salesforce on Energy Central: https://energycentral.com/o/salesforce 

Ask a Question to Our Future Guests: Do you have a burning question for the utility executives and energy industry thought leaders that we feature each week on the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast? Do you want to hear your voice on a future episode? Well starting in 2024, we’re offering you that opportunity! Head to this link where you can leave us a recorded message, including a question you’re eager to have answered on a future episode of the podcast. We’ll listen through them, pick out the right guests in our upcoming lineup to address them, and you’ll hear yourself as a part of the conversation! Energy Central on SpeakPipe: www.speakpipe.com/EnergyCentralPodcast

 

TRANSCRIPT

Jason Price:

Welcome to the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast. We bring leading minds from the energy industry into the podcast booth to discuss the challenges and trends that are transforming and modernizing our energy system. Now our listeners can submit a recorded question to a future podcast episode. Just look for the SpeakPipe link in the show notes below this episode, and leave us a voicemail with a question for our future guest. A quick thank you to Salesforce, our sponsor of today's show.

Now let's talk energy. I am Jason Price, Energy Central Podcast host and director with West Monroe, coming to you from New York City, and with me as always from Orlando, Florida is Energy Central producer and community manager, Matt Chester. Matt, as the energy landscape undergoes rapid transformation, utilities are facing a multitude of challenges and opportunities from integrating new technologies to meeting ambitious sustainability goals. You recently covered the DISTRIBUTECH 2024 Conference for the Energy Central community. How did you see the conversation about these topics take hold at this meeting of the minds?

 

Matt Chester:

Thanks, Jason. Yeah, I did have a great time at DISTRIBUTECH learning from the leaders in our industry. What I'd say is that in years past the topics you mentioned, they're all top of mind aspirational goals, things like sustainability, modernization, security, but walking the conference floor and taking in presentations this year, while those topics were of course still ever present, it seemed less about talking about them in theory and more about the practical solutions ready to deploy today. The technologies, they're not theoretical anymore. They're happening in practice, whether that's in pilot form or already being rolled out at commercial scales.

So, the challenge is they seem more surmountable and the topics people are eager to talk about are less about setting those goals and more about case studies and what's happening. Having those topics be ones that we can really get a grip on and they're more tangible because of that, it makes the conversations that much more exciting, I think.

 

Jason Price:

Yes, Matt. That's right. These conversations will be more important in today's episode. We'll be diving deep into how technology can pave the way for more transparent, efficient, and trustworthy utility sector. We'll do so with the assistance of Kelly James, a seasoned technologist with extensive experience in the energy industry. Kelly has been at the forefront of technological advancements within utilities and has witnessed firsthand the evolution of the industry towards a more customer-centric and sustainable approach.

As the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Energy Utilities at Salesforce, Kelly brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to the role of technology in building trust among stakeholders, streamlining operations, and driving innovation. From transparency and automation intelligence and data strategy, we'll be exploring the key pillars that underpin the modern utility landscape. So, Kelly James, welcome to the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast.

 

Kelly James:

Thank you, Jason, and thank you, Matt, and a big thank you to Energy Central for having me today.

 

Jason Price:

Fantastic. We're thrilled to have you. So, Kelly, we'd love to get a clearer picture about your background in the world of utility customer experience. As it seems the pathway you took to get to your current role at Salesforce plays a critical role in your vision for what the company's bringing to utilities today. So, how did you end up here?

 

Kelly James:

How did I end up here? Big question there, Jason. Well, I'll start with I'm here coming live from Austin, Texas right now. It's where I live. I grew up in Texas and I guess I've always had family and friends and it's here in the water, the world of energy here in Texas from as far back as I can remember, including I get a grandfather that worked in oil field services here in Texas. So, fast forward quite a bit, my second job out of college in the early 2000s is the job that brought me to both software and to utilities and energy. My first software job was as a manual software tester for a company that was building CIS systems for utilities in early deregulated markets.

So, pretty quickly, I moved on from software testing, which was an incredible training ground actually to building, selling, and deploying customer information and billing systems as well as really the first generation of interval and meter data management systems for utilities first in emerging competitive markets in Australia, New Zealand, Texas, UK, and then from there into more regulated utility landscape. So, that was the way back. I worked in that space for about 10 years, and then after a short break from the industry, rejoined the technology space at Salesforce in San Francisco in 2014. At the time, Salesforce was a fast growing, still is, technology company focused on CRM, but we didn't actually really have that many vertical software spaces.

Certainly, we were serving utilities, but we weren't serving the vertical in a targeted way at the time. So, I loved the technology. I loved the mission and the people at that time, really believer in Salesforce, but I wanted to stay in the utilities vertical. So, I ended up actually leaving Salesforce after about a year and a half then and joining a company called Opower, if some of you remember, in the energy efficiency and demands and management space. From there, I had the opportunity to work some incredibly smart people doing some things in early AI, which I think we're going to get to later in the space.

Ultimately, Opower was acquired by Oracle, and at Oracle, I was able to work at that intersection of customer experience, energy efficiency, and back around to good old CIS and billing systems. But all of that was great learning ground and great opportunity to work with some of the best companies, best people in utilities around the world. But I could really never get past what I saw as this great potential in the Salesforce platform to meaningfully change relationships between customers, employees at that utility level.

When I had the opportunity to do so around 2018, I jumped at being able to work with a partner to Salesforce who was building specifically for the utility industry. It was a company formerly known as Velocity that was later acquired by Salesforce. I've been lucky enough since then for the past five years to help grow a team and to work with our utilities and energy customers to really try to build the best energy specific software for customers and employee experiences in the industry. I'm lucky to get to do that every day.

 

Jason Price:

That's fantastic. It's been an amazing journey what Salesforce is doing in the utility space, and I think that for a lot of our audience, they may still be stuck in thinking of Salesforce as just a CRM company, right? But as the conversation at DISTRIBUTECH that you had with Matt and others, I mean there's an endless areas of coverage that the power industry needs that you're bringing to the table. So, talk to us about that. What are the ways in which CRM is evolving to be more encompassing energy relationship management solution?

 

Kelly James:

Yeah. In that way, CRM as our stock ticker is really both a blessing and sometimes a curse there too. So, that's fair. Yeah, I mean Salesforce is a CRM and that's our roots. We're a 25-year-old company now, but what we're driving for across all different industries and then specifically now in the utility industry is that that relationship platform.

Especially in infrastructure-heavy industries like utilities and energy, we are really the utility and energy relationship platform now really supercharged by data and AI and specifically working hard on the challenges in customer service, in field service, in the future of clean energy programs and the energy transition and doing that across your customers, of course, but across your people, your employees, your assets, your data, and the work that you're trying to get done every day. The goal here is to use the CRM and the platform that Salesforce provides to unlock trapped data from your systems of record and your back office systems and to facilitate and automate that work across all the different parts of the organization and in service of your customers.

So, we're helping companies like Florida Power & Light here in the US, National Grid, Xcel, PSEG, TXU to name a few and others to really do that, to connect people, assets, data and their work and to really help supercharged customer relationships. It's about improving those relationships, but that's in service of the goal of operational efficiency. So, we have seen and believe there's an opportunity right now, even today to be at least 30, 40% more efficient. AI is going to be part of that, of solving that challenge in a big way.

So, when we say we're more than a CRM, that's what we mean. I think some of the most common use cases we see our customer service and customer experience that folks are using Salesforce for, but also to execute on clean energy programs and manage that portfolio as well as net zero and carbon reduction initiatives, extensive field service across both customer and across power delivery and asset operations, and even what folks might not think of us for, but supporting teams who are working on grid resiliency and emergency management, crisis management strategies.

Utilities in the US and around the world are using Salesforce for all of these things. We've made some deep investments over the past four or five years that support these specific use cases in utilities and even more so now with connecting more and more data and enabling AI for even greater efficiencies now.

 

Jason Price:

Knowing how the utilities operate, there are so many different stakeholders, so many different departments that need information and many of them operate in silos. You are effectively basically breaking some of those silos down, improving the process, automating those processes, which is really a serious situation and necessary for the utilities. I would say more so probably in the DER space than anywhere else, that workflow process is critical to make sure that all the different departments are aware of it. So, I'd like you to talk a little bit about that. One of your alignments is in the DER space, basically accelerating the interconnection. Can you talk about what you're doing in that space and what's coming next in that for you?

 

Kelly James:

Yeah, sure. It's actually an area I'm really passionate about personally. There's so much opportunity in this space to take the friction out of the system, and that's not just in real world, in physical world technologies, but's in the human friction in the system, and to really drive forward our systemic ability to connect distributed energy resources in order to accelerate the energy transition and do this efficiently. We don't have much of a choice. We're going to have to go faster and operate more efficiently. Utilities know this and they're working hard on this challenge.

All of the energy sector knows this and we're trying to help where we believe we can best, which is in that connected tissue between different parts of the utility as you said, then thank you for saying it there, but yeah, in the unlocking of the silos of data and the silos of work and connecting utilities to stakeholders, to customers and to workers and getting the work flowing more efficiently. Some of it is about real-time or real-time sharing of data that's critical, but actually just as much, some of it is about really more efficient data into planning and into execution of design and taking that, as I said, human friction out of it, reducing the unnecessary delays in the process and getting those distributed resources connected faster.

I think everybody's aware, there's a record-paced rollout of different types of larger-scale utility renewables as well as smaller-scale distributed resources. All of this is taking longer than anybody had hoped. So, what we are working on with utilities is we're working to equip field teams to be faster and smarter about DER deployment, and some of that includes AI. Einstein Copilot's sitting right next to them, helping them understand their work in the field more quickly and easily and summarize things to get them onto the next set of work more quickly. Also, Salesforce is providing generative AI tools to automate different, like we said, common tasks, but also to execute on more sophisticated scheduling and dispatching of workers.

So, that's not just in short cycle work, but that's also managing medium and long cycle work. So, how can we get the work flowing, so the folks that are doing the hard physical work out in the field every day and also the administrative work to execute on moving these connections through the queue faster? There are so many points that can have little leaps and big leaps here and AI and automation is helping us do that. Maybe to give you one example of one of our customers, Sunova is a customer of ours, not a utility, but they're deploying and managing a lot of rooftop solar installations. They've done some pretty sophisticated things using AI to take out those repetitive tasks and to speed up field processes.

So, they use Salesforce's MuleSoft integration capability to connect across their different asset systems and their customer systems and connect directly with the assets in order to do a better job of managing the process of installation, as well as managing things like predictive maintenance actions. They're also using AI to automatically create service cases in order to more quickly execute against managing those distributed energy resources. They're guiding agents to things like resolving calls faster with real-time sentiment analysis and next best action. Those types of small nuggets of work that accelerate all of this are going to be key to the overall accelerating of the energy transition.

 

Jason Price:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean it's such a high-profile issue and I think sometimes our listeners may not fully appreciate the context of all this. Every state has climate goals and it's really going to come down to how quickly you can get these interconnections through the queue completed so that we can roll out more DER. It's critical on every level, and it's a really high-profile issue.

 

Kelly James:

Yeah, big and small. I think we like to talk about that a lot, what we can do in a big way to make big change, but also thousands and thousands of points of small change can also make a bigger change as well.

 

Jason Price:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I want to talk about everyone's favorite two vowels, AI. You brought it up and there was no shortage of it at DISTRIBUTECH 2024. Anyone who attended it, it was constant discussion about AI. So, let's talk about that for a minute. How do you see AI playing a role in utilities and what does this mean in streamlining processes within utilities and its overall impact, especially as it relates to O&M costs?

 

Kelly James:

Yeah, it's huge. Yeah, you can't get through two sentences without saying AI these days, can you, or hearing it from somebody speaking? We're no different, but I think we are different in the way we're actually acting on it. I hope folks will find, but there are tremendous opportunities for efficiency gains. Even in our current customer base, we've deployed a lot in terms of AI within our Salesforce platform and the CRM, and we're already seeing just these key points of 20, 30, and 40% gains in efficiency across different types of operations, service operations, sales operations. I think what we should actually first talk about is that utilities have been executing on powerful analytics and predictive AI for years actually.

So, it's an industry that actually has been doing a lot with data for a while. Things like low desegregation or solar EV detection or weather modeling, different types of predictive AI and different types of analytics to do a lot of sophisticated work for a long time. But the difference in this moment, there were a couple things. First, data previously had largely stayed locked in a silo or locked in a single set of hands to a few people with a control of that and with the ability to act on that data and to do something with it, but it wasn't actionable at scale. I think that's this moment where we have now where predictive AI and generative AI, which is the massive change that has come in the last year plus, is able to create this powerful combination of actionable data at scale in the flow of work that generative AI now powers and pushes through.

So, it's that combination of data, AI, and CRM, and it has to be trusted data and AI and CRM that is letting us now unlock and make all of these things actionable and automated in many cases. What it really looks like in practice, I mean we can start with customer service and residential customers. It looks like things like one-click service appointment scheduling, just done using the system to take minimal preferences like the data it already has to execute efficiently on service appointment that you can actually rely on. So, it's not this all day window. I'm on my way, and then it looks like Uber-like tracking of technicians. It looks like then natural language answers to customers and to reps in the field. That makes sense.

It is not like a bot talking at you. It is a bot, but it's explaining to you something really meaningful about your account or about this customer's account and about why their energy usage has changed in a way that's grounded in data and in their own account and highly personalized. For business customers and key account managers, it's more about using the data across systems to create a holistic view of energy for that business. It's about recommending strategies for energy savings that have a true return on investment and helping walk them through capital investments as well as providing carbon reduction advice.

So, it's about this combination of predictive AI, helping to understand the data and also analytics and then executing that using generative AI to help accelerate the process of communication. That's the big change here. I could go on. I won't, but I could go on with examples where we're using that to enhance scheduling and dispatching of field teams to really do both, be much more efficient and then even calculate other types of models, environmental factors, urgency into that. Then field workers is another place where we can enhance safety and also help execute work faster with pre-work summaries and intelligent truck inventory and automated wrap-up of tickets. There are so many use cases out there where we can take that applied generative AI in the flow of work to create efficiency and action.

 

Jason Price:

Yeah, the practicality of it all, right? It's very critical.

 

Kelly James:

Yeah.

 

Jason Price:

I want to talk about another theme that came up at DISTRIBUTECH, and actually, it came from you. That is the theme around trust. So, here we're talking AI, we're talking automation, we're talking our energy system. So, I'd like you to elaborate on the theme of trust and talk about this across your partnerships and your stakeholders. How can technology platforms both inspire the theme of trust and utilize it in the evolving power sector landscape?

 

Kelly James:

Yeah. Well, trust is the bedrock of what I think everybody's trying to do here, whether every company talks about it or not. At Salesforce, we do talk about it a lot. We have five core values and it's the first of them, and that's because we were born in the SaaS software landscape. The first and most important thing 25 years ago about SaaS software was do we trust this other company with our data? That's just core to what we do for a long time. So, in the world of AI, it's an extension of that for us. For utilities, it's an extension of their core promise to their customers as well and to their stakeholders of safety, reliability, and affordability.

So, as a public service, as an essential service, to maintain that, they use this term maybe more in Australia than the US but that social license to operate, to maintain that, it's all about trusted relationships with the stakeholders in the community, with customers across all of the business connections and partnerships. So, we at Salesforce think about trust in everything we do. As it applies to AI, there is a pretty serious amount of variation in the offerings out there today and how they are executing on using data, working within large language models and applying trust to AI.

There's a real need, we believe, to embed trust at the heart of the relationship between all of these companies, the people that they serve, and in the use of AI to ensure that we are acting with integrity when we are bringing in these really powerful tools into the relationship. So, I think everybody's out there, probably everybody listening here has used or experimented with AI at some point now. It's too much of a cliche to say, raise your hand if you use ChatGPT now. So, everybody gets that you ask a question or you put into this model a query and they're powered by these really big powerful models underneath. The models are fed data that come from the public, and from that, we get these answers to these questions. That's great. It's working well.

It's learning still and working great for basic consumer needs, but it's not great from a business perspective in that consumer form by itself, because every company really wants to understand how they can harness that power of that consumer AI. But in order to do that in a way for business and actually achieve these efficiencies at scale, they have to answer some really important questions. So, that is how can I trust the source of the data that is coming and that is being introduced into the conversation with AI? Is our data, is my data as a utility or as an energy company secure? Am I complying and protecting the data of my business and my customers, things like PII and other things, and how do I control for things like hallucinations and toxicity?

So that's just to make it safe and trusted. Then how do I make it good? How do I connect the systems of record and my source data and all of these things? How do I get the AI to actually understand my customer in the context of my business and turn what looks like magic in the consumer space into something that's really applicable to business? So that's what we've set out to solve and that's what we've spent over 10 years really driving at ethical AI development. So, that was something we started well long ago and have been participating in for many, many years and have some 300 AI patents at Salesforce, but the last two years, year and a half have been incredible.

The way we are approaching this is by building into every step of the way when we're working with utilities and we're working with any customer, those layers of trust. So, that your data is your own or your customers, depending on what industry you work in and what country. The AI models that we're deploying with Salesforce learn and improve based on your own data, but in a really secure and protected environment where your company's data doesn't leak out to the public large language models. So, we're able to pull the best of consumer, combine it with the best of secure, grounded data from within your company, from either within Salesforce or using our data cloud technology connected to all of the other source systems that you have, and then using that to execute on all those tasks we just talked about, right in the flow of work.

Before we present anything back to a human at all, we're checking it for toxicity, we're checking it for hallucinations, and we're auditing all of it. So, that mechanism of securing your data, trusted AI is critical and is really differentiated in the industry. The amount of time and effort we put into making sure that this is something that is trusted, again, our number one tenet here and that you can use to get really good results. So, full circle back, what are we trying to do? We're trying to use the data that we have, unlock it and give us fantastic information for our customer or about our assets or our field work teams that they can act on much faster and to get those efficiency gains.

So, that's how we're thinking about it differently. That was a bit of a long one for you, Jason, but I think there are real differences in how this is being executed in the industry right now.

 

Jason Price:

Sure. All right. Kelly, I want you to sit back and reflect on your history in this industry in the following way. I think it's really interesting what you bring to the table in your perspective because it's rather unique. You can be a CEO of utility and you'll see things from a certain perspective, but your eyes have to be everywhere. From your perspective, you certainly have a wide enough landscape, but it's perhaps a little bit more narrow because there's a customer-centric component here.

So, what I'm getting at is that I would just love to hear from you. You bring and you've experienced the crossroads of the evolution of this industry from a technology standpoint, from a modernization standpoint, and most importantly the customer and the unique relationship that the utility has with the customer, which has not always been so favorable, but you've seen over time how the utilities are turning that massive ship and treating the customer as if it were like the treatment in other industry.

So, I'd love to hear from you if you could, think of an event or does something stick out regarding this journey that really sticks with you? What is an impact of this transformation that you've experienced on the utility operations and its overall relationship with its customers? Do you have an anecdote or an experience you could share and just your general thoughts around that whole journey you've been taking and witnessing?

 

Kelly James:

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm trying to ground it in a moment, it's tricky, but I think we all have moments that stick with us when we've been working with either customers or utility employees. I think sometimes the ones that get you and stick with you are when a program has struggled and then you can have a breakthrough. I remember' there's an instance not that long back, but we're trying to work with a company to improve a deployment of software and the IT teams are doing their best to work with the business teams, et cetera. We're in a workshop with some users and they go, "No, you don't understand. If we don't make a change to this, we continue to have increases in the number of our folks calling out sick with repetitive stress injuries."

So to hear that the process that was in place today that the software, whether legacy or new software is putting in place, is actually injuring people. That's the thing we need to really center when we're thinking about users, when we're thinking about customers, when we're thinking about deploying technology. So, hopefully, that's a story that we never have to hear again at any company that I'm working with. So, to turn that to the positive, I think what we see be incredibly successful is when these moments, when IT works hand in hand now with the business and with the customers to create successful change across the board.

What had to happen to make that a reality is the technology had to catch up to a point where you could iterate in moments sitting next to people, which is where it is now, where you can sit side by side with somebody from the business and maybe somebody who's semi-technical IT and work through the problem together, go, "Yup, no, let's make a change. Let's see. Does that work? Yes." Then you can do this true A/B testing of different types of processes with customers and being able to experiment and fail fast and iterate fast. The technology did not support that a while back, not too long in the past, and you could do it maybe at a design level, but then you still were waiting for six months for IT to spit it out the other side.

So, that step change in how we can actually work together on technology is then key, bringing it back around to the energy transition question. Our customers are generators now, right? Our customer is residential, and very importantly, right now, our largest customers are actively involved in a way and we must have them involved in the way they never had to do before, so are partners that utilities never had to work with before or never really needed to. So, OEMs, automotive companies, all of the contractors deploying different types of energy efficiency and distributed energy resources, EV charging.

The connected fabric of the industry has to and is getting tighter in order to create the efficiencies we need for keeping pace and even accelerating the energy transition and you can't come fast enough. There was a time when with all these core tenants under pressure, everybody would say, "Let's slow down, let's be measured." We still need to be smart and measured, but going slower now increases risk. So, we have to be able to continue to pick up the pace and work together to accelerate the different facets of the industry that are going to get us there faster. So, there's huge opportunity.

I think there's also tremendous opportunity in the folks that continue to enter the job force who want to work in clean energy and sustainability. If we can connect the dots on these are the jobs that drive this forward, we have the technology to help do it and these industries are great places to work to make change, then I think we've got tremendous opportunity here.

 

Jason Price:

Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. Kelly, we are going to give you the last word in this podcast, but first, we have what's called the lightning round, which gives us an opportunity to pivot, to learn a little bit more about you the person rather than you the professional. We typically ask about five or six questions. We ask you to keep your response to one word or phrase, and let's have some fun. So, are you ready?

 

Kelly James:

I'm ready. Bring it on. All right.

 

Jason Price:

Okay. All right. First question, favorite travel destination and what makes it so special?

 

Kelly James:

New Zealand. I used to live there and South Island's one of the most beautiful places on earth.

 

Jason Price:

What's your comfort food?

 

Kelly James:

So mac and cheese or our family recipe for jalapeno cheese grits. It's a tie.

 

Jason Price:

Do you have any hobbies or interests that might surprise your peers?

 

Kelly James:

I love photography, fine art and documentary photography. I actually went back and studied it in school just for fun.

 

Jason Price:

Interesting. As a native Austinite, what is a must see in your hometown?

 

Kelly James:

Okay, Barton Springs and the bats. Look up the bats also.

 

Jason Price:

I'm familiar with the bats. Yeah. We offer you the opportunity to ask a future guest a question. So, related to energy or off the wall, do you want to challenge a future guest to answer a question?

 

Kelly James:

Sure. We talked a lot about interconnections and I think about it from a software and operations perspective, but I have a lot of great colleagues, friends, and acquaintances in the policy space. I would love to hear more creative solutions across policy and across business stakeholder, continuing the creative conversation about how to accelerate and rationalize the interconnection bottlenecks. Let's keep that conversation going.

 

Jason Price:

Okay. Just to remind you that this is one word or phrase response, this last question may be a bit tough, but try your best. Lastly, what are you most passionate about?

 

Kelly James:

Personally, my family and spending time with them. Professionally, people powering the energy transition.

 

Jason Price:

I like that. Nice job. I said we'd give you the final word. So, knowing that the utility leadership is listening to this podcast, what message would you like our listeners to take away from this episode?

 

Kelly James:

It's about people and people powering the energy transition, but from a Salesforce perspective, there's a lot you can do today with AI powered energy relationships and you can today be 30% more efficient. So, we'd love to continue helping all the utilities out there with that.

 

Jason Price:

Fantastic, great insight. Love the wisdom, love the insight you've shared with us today. Really, I'm fully confident we're going to see a lot of activity from the Energy Central community where they will post their questions, and hopefully, Kelly will send them on to you and you can answer them directly.

 

Kelly James:

Happy to.

 

Jason Price:

Thank you so much. Yeah, we'll send them on to you. Hopefully, you'll come back and we'll check in and see what's coming up and what's changing and what's new and exciting in Salesforce, maybe a year from now or even less than a year from now. So, we want to thank you for joining us today on the podcast.

 

Kelly James:

Thank you. Appreciate it.

 

Jason Price:

Awesome. You can always reach Kelly through the platform. We should welcome your questions and comments, and we also want to give a shout-out and thanks of course to the podcast sponsors that made today's episode possible. Thanks to Salesforce. Energy and utility companies trust Salesforce's number one AI and CRM platform to lead the transition to a clean, equitable energy future. Learn more at salesforce.com. Once again, I'm your host, Jason Price. Plug in and stay fully charged in the discussion by hopping into the community at energycentral.com. We'll see you next time at the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast.

 

About Energy Central Podcasts

The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ features conversations with thought leaders in the utility sector. At least twice monthly, we connect with an Energy Central Power Industry Network community member to discuss compelling topics that impact professionals who work in the power industry. Some podcasts may be a continuation of thought-provoking posts or discussions started in the community or with an industry leader that is interested in sharing their expertise and doing a deeper dive into hot topics or issues relevant to the industry.

The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ is the premiere podcast series from Energy Central, a Power Industry Network of Communities built specifically for professionals in the electric power industry and a place where professionals can share, learn, and connect in a collaborative environment. Supported by leading industry organizations, our mission is to help global power industry professionals work better. Since 1995, we’ve been a trusted news and information source for professionals working in the power industry, and today our managed communities are a place for lively discussions, debates, and analysis to take place. If you’re not yet a member, visit www.EnergyCentral.com to register for free and join over 200,000 of your peers working in the power industry.

The Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast is hosted by Jason Price, Community Ambassador of Energy Central. Jason is a Business Development Executive at West Monroe, working in the East Coast Energy and Utilities Group. Jason is joined in the podcast booth by the producer of the podcast, Matt Chester, who is also the Community Manager of Energy Central and energy analyst/independent consultant in energy policy, markets, and technology.  

If you want to be a guest on a future episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast, let us know! We’ll be pulling guests from our community members who submit engaging content that gets our community talking, and perhaps that next guest will be you! Likewise, if you see an article submitted by a fellow Energy Central community member that you’d like to see broken down in more detail in a conversation, feel free to send us a note to nominate them.  For more information, contact us at [email protected]. Podcast interviews are free for Expert Members and professionals who work for a utility.  We have package offers available for solution providers and vendors. 

Happy listening, and stay tuned for our next episode! Like what you hear, have a suggestion for future episodes, or a question for our guest? Leave a note in the comments below.

All new episodes of the Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast will be posted to the relevant Energy Central community group, but you can also subscribe to the podcast at all the major podcast outlets, including:

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