AI in UK Energy Retail

Domestic satisfaction with energy suppliers reached an all-time high of 82% in August 2025. Complaints are at their lowest level since 2022. The Energy Ombudsman accepted 14% fewer cases in 2025 than in 2024. Over the same period, domestic debt and arrears reached a record £4.79bn, arrears with no repayment plan grew to roughly three times the size of managed debt, and more than 279,000 electricity customers on prepayment meters went over three hours without power in a single quarter.

Both sets of numbers are Ofgem's. They are not in conflict — they are measuring different people. Satisfaction runs at 88% among consumers doing well and 67% among those behind on their bills. Suppliers correctly signposted consumers to the Ombudsman in an average of 48% of cases, and the Chief Ombudsman has said publicly that up to 75% of those who could use the service never do. The measures look best precisely where the customer is least likely to be in trouble, and a model trained on that record inherits the blindness and applies it at scale.

A household on a smart prepayment meter runs out of credit. The meter tells the supplier. Nothing happens. In its June 2026 settlement with OVO, Ofgem found that the supplier "did not consistently support customers who self-disconnected from their energy supply" and that in some cases customers who had run out of credit received no communication or follow-up at all. No domestic customer has been formally disconnected for non-payment since the first quarter of 2023 — which is not the same as saying nobody's supply stops. The technology to detect this has existed for years. Detection was never the problem.

Seventeen pages, written for a stakeholder who knows energy retail well and AI not at all:

• A note on the numbers — what is included, what was excluded, and why
• The wider market, and the pressure point stated as the contradiction it is
• What is actually driving the debt — depth rather than breadth, and what it costs every billpayer
• The conduct picture: the Energy Ombudsman's data against Ofgem's two 2026 enforcement settlements
• The record you would be training on — including Ofgem's own published price list for the consequences of a bad customer record
• Four risks specific to this sector, in Ofgem's own words
• The threat side — impersonation of the redress route, which is not the same story as fraud
• The UK legal position, and the change to automated decision-making that came into force in February 2026
• What can be done today, how it develops over three years, and what to measure
• An eight-workstream way in

Every figure carries a source. Six were found and deliberately excluded, and the exclusions are listed in the document itself — among them the entire body of vendor claims about AI in energy debt recovery, the deepfake-fraud percentages circulating for 2026, and the "£4.55bn record energy debt" figure repeated widely in early 2026 and already £240m out of date.

Four findings were corrected during verification before the briefing was written, including the status of Ofgem's Debt Relief Scheme — announced for a January 2026 decision and, as at publication, still unpublished.

A supplier executive who has just picked up an AI programme, a non-executive being asked to approve one, or anyone on the policy side who wants a plain, sourced account of where the sector actually stands. It is written to work for all three.