By Alex Smith |
British energy company Centrica has expanded its use of Microsoft Power Platform across its business, combining improved governance tools with new AI development capabilities to achieve an estimated $10 million in cost savings.
The company, which supplies consumers and businesses across the UK and Ireland with energy through brands including British Gas and Bord Gáis Energy, has been building on the platform since 2018. It now has more than 13,000 active users and over 1,100 apps developed by a maker community of more than 430 employees.
“The utilities industry is more competitive than ever,” said James Boswell, director of digital productivity and innovation at Centrica. “To stay competitive, we are using tools like Power Platform and Copilot Studio to quickly build internal efficiencies, better serve our customers and ensure our engineers have access to the best tools for innovation.”
To manage governance at scale, Centrica established a Centre of Excellence using Microsoft's Power Platform Centre of Excellence Starter Kit, customising it into a front-door system that automatically detects new development activity, prompts makers to register their solution, calculates a risk score and routes higher-risk projects to a review panel. Makers are provided with development, test and production environments alongside training resources and a code review tool.
The company then adopted Managed Environments capabilities to move makers out of a shared default environment and into personal productivity environments, enabling cleaner licence assignment, more consistent policy application and better monitoring. “Managed Environments have been great at helping us better manage a rapidly growing number of Power Platform makers and applications, even with a small support team,” said Baviya Surendran, business systems administrator at Centrica.
The governance foundation enabled Centrica to move into more advanced platform features, including Power Apps code apps, which allow developers to build custom web applications in a code-first environment while retaining the guardrails of managed environments. The technology is being used to expand Flex First, the company's highest-used application, through which employees book desks and meeting rooms. Developers are adding more than 200 new capabilities to the app, including a 3D wayfinding tool.
Centrica has also made Agent Builder available to all employees for building simple AI agents within Microsoft 365 Copilot, with one agent saving hundreds of hours annually by checking email content for policy compliance. More advanced agents are being developed in Copilot Studio, including a career development agent that draws on employee self-assessment data to provide personalised guidance on roles and training, and a customised Employee Self-Service (ESS) agent handling HR and IT queries through a multi-agent architecture connected to systems including ServiceNow.
“Each system we connect to with our ESS agent has its own business logic and rules which often change over time,” said Dale Wakeman, head of Power Platform at Centrica. “Rather than having to continuously update a single ESS agent, we simply hand off to a system's platform agent using Copilot Studio and the updates are handled automatically.”
Centrica estimates $3.5 million in savings from native platform capabilities including automation and self-service development, and a further $7.6 million from reduced reliance on third-party suppliers through in-house application development.