EGI Employee Stories: GenAI tools support E-Mobility employees in accelerating the energy transition

In E.ON Group Innovation, E-Mobility teams were some of the first to start using GenAI tools – starting off slowly, but now using multiple tools. What was your initial reaction??

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Finally! - The future is now. E-Mobility is a very demanding topic for which product development requires us employees to move fast and be out on the field a lot. The regulatory landscape is always changing, and developing innovative solutions for a zero-carbon future needs to be agile. A lot of exchange is required with a wide variety of different internal and external partners as a result.?

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For example, we work closely with E.ON units such as E.ON Drive (on charging infrastructure including customer products), E.ON Deutschland (on topics such as developing use cases for solar charging), E.ON Energy Markets (on flexibility use cases), E.ON Digital Technology (on IT topics for flexibility such as forecasting and simulations) as well as our DSOs (Distribution System Operators, the important backbone for connecting any and every E-Mobility product)? – just to name a few.?

And, outside of E.ON, we work with external partners across the energy world but also different industries (like manufacturers and IT companies), exchange with government, academia and research institutions on policy development, and much more.??

These discussions are extremely time-consuming. So, I’ve been waiting a long while to have some of my “dull” computer-based work automatised. When it comes to the energy transition, wasting time is not an option!?

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What kind of desk work does your job require and why is it important??

E-Mobility product development requires deep technical knowledge of hardware, software, protocols, and interfaces – which differ greatly from project to project. This means reading and sourcing long, in-depth research papers (often, a 100-plus pages), for example, from universities (FfE, RWTH, EBZ) or consultancy firms/lobby organisations (P3, Agora, pwc). Obviously, this behind-the-scenes work takes unbelievable hours on end!?

On top of that, to understand these papers, one needs to have the most up-to-date knowledge about the regulatory frameworks: old and new laws from the European Union, German Association of Energy and Water Industries, Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and others (these are also always changing).?

Since our projects are so international, sometimes this also means finding information in different languages, or relying on translations.?

Without taking these steps, and seeking out all this knowledge, our team would never be able to participate in political circles, accurately sharing the energy industry’s opinions to help shape new laws, or even discuss with relevant external partners to form those opinions, go against competitors, and so on.? ?

In what way has GenAI helped you with these tasks??

Easy research, easy summaries, easy translations – reducing a flood of information, and saving hours of work, within seconds .We use different tools for different tasks – one for translation, another for on-the-go research, and another for processing this information into, let’s say, briefs, PowerPoint presentations and other asset documents such as management summaries.?

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Also important: we use different tools because not one tool can do everything, and GenAI as a technology itself still has many limitations. While these tools make processes much easier, their output inevitably always contains some mistakes. This means I need to always check everything over, from facts to sources, et cetera.?

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What is one surprising impact that Gen AI has on your job??

When working on new product ideas, we often get really excited about their development – because we know how innovative or groundbreaking these E-Mobility solutions can be and what they can be capable of! But these solutions mean nothing if they don’t have impact with customers, and we need to make sure they resonate with customers too. Often that comes down to one question: “What’s in it for me (How can I save money)?”?

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By reducing our workloads in processing information, we have a lot more time to communicate with customers. We can take extra care and attention in presenting solutions in ways for customers to understand then, and most importantly, be willing to incorporate them into their everyday lives and change their consumer behaviours.?

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You could say this is an indirect outcome of AI on our work in the E-Mobility industry, but the direct outcomes are just as impressive and endless! After all, AI can help us to identify customers’ exact needs and tailor all our products and solutions accordingly. Ultimately, that’s what the energy transition is all about.?

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