#64 - Abhay Gupta, CEO of Bidgely - On how AI is shaping a better future for all of us by transforming the Utility industry

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the Utility industry, and my guest is Abhay Gupta, CEO of Bidgely.

Abhay founded Bidgely with the mission of leveraging data to transform the utility industry. Today, Bidgely is very well positioned with the technology and know-how to not only help the utility industry go to market quicker, but also to optimize their customer engagements.

As the CEO of Bidgely, Abhay has led the company from concept to market leadership. Prior to Bidgely, Abhay worked at a combination of energy and technology companies, including Grid Net, Echelon and Sun Microsystems. He holds a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, a Master of Science from University of Southern California, and an M.B.A. from Santa Clara University.

It was the big idea behind Bidgely and the fact some of their customers decided to mention it in their television campaigns that led me to invite Abhay to my podcast. We explore the challenges the utility industry is facing on three levels: Their infrastructure, their operation and their customers. We dive deep into the opportunity that’s ahead of us, and why this can only be solved with the support of the latest technologies.

Here are some of his quotes:

I ended up in product management and building smart meters for the energy industry somehow in my career.

And we were building smart meters, we realized all this data that is produced by smart meters has so much potential. It's just not being used for its potential.

So, we identified this opportunity to disrupt the decision-making process and the whole opportunity energy industry because if you look at the retail, internet, medical, any of the industry the data is used for so much and so much personalization.

So much of value creation. The energy industry is lagging behind massively.

The utility industry has not changed for decades.

The primary business for most of the utilities in the world has been about how to keep the lights on, how to build power plants, how to keep the distribution and transmission of the energy correctly happening.

This is the opportunity for the utility and energy industry to completely change and morph themselves into something, what I call at par with the Google and Amazon of the world.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How a byproduct of your core innovation could end up giving your customer the ultimate point of differentiation
2. How to make strategic decisions in situations where there are multiple solid routes to solving a problem
3. How focusing on customer experience can result in radical cuts in internal operational cost at the same time