There’s something powerful about watching an industry collectively plan its future. That’s exactly what happened at this year’s E Source Conference in Denver, where our Mindgrub team asked the deceptively simple question: what does utility customer experience look like now, next, and later?

What started as sticky notes and marker scribbles turned into dozens of candid conversations about the real work ahead. Utility leaders weren’t just listing features. They were describing the specific friction points keeping their customers from engaging. They were naming the organizational barriers slowing down innovation. They were being honest about what’s actually hard, not just what sounds impressive on a roadmap.

By the end of the conference, those boards told a story I think every utility executive needs to hear. The industry knows exactly where it needs to go. The question now is whether utilities can move fast enough to get there.

Why This Year Felt Different

Affordability dominated nearly every session I sat in on. Not as a side topic, but as the frame through which every other investment gets evaluated. Can we justify this AI implementation when customers are struggling to pay their bills? Does this personalization feature actually help people manage costs, or is it just clever technology?

Utilities are asking themselves a question that extends well beyond their digital roadmaps: how do we build trust when our customers are anxious about money, confused about their usage, and skeptical that we actually care? That’s not a technology problem; that’s a relationship problem that technology might help solve.

 

What the Boards Revealed This Year

Our Three Horizons framework is simple by design. Horizon 1 (Now) captures what customers need immediately. Horizon 2 (Next) explores what’s possible in the next 2-3 years. Horizon 3 (Later) looks toward the transformative changes that could redefine everything.

What surprised me wasn’t what ended up on the boards. It was how little disagreement there was about priorities.

Horizon 1 focused on the essentials: transparent billing, real-time usage data, easy payments, multilingual access, and fraud protection. Seeing these priorities in the ‘Now’ column highlights how important it is for utilities to reinforce their foundational customer experience.

Horizon 2 shifted to intelligence and personalization: AI-powered chatbots, automated program enrollments, predictive usage alerts, segment-based communications. The technology exists. The challenge is implementation at scale without losing the human touch.

Horizon 3 got uncomfortable in the best way: vehicle-to-grid pilots, customer-owned data, bidirectional utility engagement, virtual power plant integration. Most utilities aren’t ready for this conversation yet, but the leading ones are already building toward it.

 

Five Trends That Showed Up Everywhere

Reviewing the boards and reflecting on the sessions, five trends kept surfacing. These aren’t predictions. They’re patterns I watched play out in real time, with real utility leaders admitting real challenges.

1. The Basics Still Aren’t Basic Enough

It’s easy to look at a list of ‘fundamentals’ and assume they’re universal. In reality, many organizations have these pieces in some form, but they often fall short of what customers now expect.

One utility leader pulled me aside to share that her team had spent six months simplifying their bill pay flow. Six months. The result was immediate improvement in satisfaction scores, but the fact that it took that long tells you something about how complex these “basic” experiences had become.

I thought about our recent mobile app benchmarking study, where the highest-rated utilities weren’t the ones with the most features. They were the ones that made bill pay, outage reporting, and account access feel effortless.

CPS Energy proved this with their Bill Prediction Tool and Assistance Finder. They made affordability support easy to find and easy to use, and customer interactions jumped 20%. The tool didn’t do anything revolutionary. It just removed friction.

Tacoma Power took another approach with their Bill Credit Assistance Program, rewarding on-time payments with automatic credits. Different tactics, same result: when you stop making customers work so hard, they engage.

The phrase I heard in nearly every breakout session was “one-stop shop.” Not as an aspiration, but as a requirement. Web, mobile, voice, they should all pull from the same design system and data layer. Most utilities aren’t there yet, and their customers notice.

2. Affordability Isn’t a Program Anymore, It’s the Program

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say their utility bills have increased compared to last year. Your customers have noticed. 

What struck me about this year’s conference was how affordability came up organically in sessions about mobile apps, personalization, AI, employee experience, everything. It’s become the lens through which utilities are evaluating every digital investment. Not “should we build this?” but “will this help customers manage their costs?”

The utilities getting this right aren’t treating affordability as a separate initiative buried three clicks deep in their website. They’re integrating it into every digital touchpoint. Here’s what that actually looks like:

• Bill forecasting tools that help customers plan ahead
• High-usage alerts that arrive before the bill does
• Program eligibility information that shows up proactively, not when customers go searching
• Enrollment processes simple enough that stressed customers can actually complete them

When barriers exist (like complex applications, unclear eligibility requirements, programs hidden behind confusing navigation or third-party links), adoption suffers. 

Affordability needs to be woven into your customer portal as foundational infrastructure, not added as an afterthought when budget season rolls around.

3. Personalization Is Finally Happening (For Real This Time)

I’ve been hearing utilities talk about personalization for years. This year felt different because utilities were talking about what they’ve actually implemented, not what they’re planning to consider maybe implementing someday.

During one engaging session, PG&E walked through their personalization strategy with refreshing honesty about starting small and scaling intentionally. Tailored bill summaries for different customer segments. Proactive outage alerts that account for individual circumstances. These create real value because they reduce customer effort.

What also stood out to me was Exelon’s Customer Journey Effort Score, which was explored during the keynote. They’re measuring how hard customers have to work at every interaction, then using that data to fix the highest-friction moments: payment disputes, service enrollments, program sign-ups.

This is what personalization actually means. Helping them understand why their bill looks the way it does. Bridging the gap between data and meaning.

The utilities getting this right are seeing measurable results: higher program enrollment, better satisfaction scores, and increased digital engagement. 

4. AI That Helps People Instead of Replacing Them

Georgia Power’s Contact Center AI presentation was one of the most honest conversations about AI implementation I’ve heard in a while.

Their Generative AI Auto Assist Tool gives customer service reps real-time response suggestions. Early versions felt robotic. So Georgia Power iterated, incorporated feedback, and made the tool conversational. The result: better customer experience scores and higher employee morale. That’s what happens when you design AI to support human judgment instead of eliminating it.

The utilities approaching AI this way are seeing real results. The ones treating it as a cost-cutting exercise are missing the entire point. AI should scale empathy, not replace it. It should make it possible to deliver personalized, timely, contextually appropriate support across thousands of interactions.

If your AI strategy is primarily about reducing headcount, you’re building the wrong thing.

5. Your Employee Experience Is Your Customer Experience

I was happy to see that some utilities, such as PG&E, are now embedding design thinking and collaborative tools like Figma and Miro directly into employee workflows. The result was better tools, but also employees who could anticipate customer problems before they became crises. When your team is engaged in the UX process, they become natural customer advocates.

This is culture work, not just product work. And it’s one of the most overlooked opportunities utilities have for improving customer experience.

As utilities invest in increasingly sophisticated digital tools and AI capabilities, employee experience becomes more critical, not less. Your team needs digital collaboration platforms that actually work. They need AI assistants that streamline complex workflows instead of adding frustration. They need to feel like partners in improving customer experience, not obstacles to route around.

Get this wrong, and every other digital investment you make will underperform.

 

What I’m Taking Away

I spent three days standing next to those Horizons boards, watching utility leaders wrestle with hard questions about their digital future. Here’s what became clear: utilities know exactly where they need to go. The direction is there; now it’s about speed and execution.

The future utility customer wants more than reliable power. They want control over their energy usage, transparency about their costs, and confidence that their utility actually understands their needs. The utilities designing for those expectations today, across all three horizons, are building sustainable competitive advantages.

Here’s what I know after E Source 2025: the gap between leading utilities and lagging ones is widening. The utilities investing in these digital capabilities now will be the ones customers choose to stay with. The ones treating digital as a cost center to minimize will find themselves losing ground to competitors who understand what’s actually at stake.

Ready to build your digital experience roadmap? Our team has compiled everything we learned at E Source 2025 into a comprehensive Digital User Experience Trends Report, including the complete Three Horizons utilities roadmap, detailed implementation guides for each trend, and practical frameworks you can adapt to your customer experience strategy.

Download the full 2025 Digital User Experience Trends Report or connect with our energy and utilities team to discuss how these insights apply to your organization.