Lessons From Telecoms, Applied to Energy

Powerverse didn’t start for me in energy. My thinking goes back to my time in telecoms, and the lessons I carried from there.

At CloudSense, the enterprise software company I co-founded, we spent years helping telecoms and media companies shift their commercial models. They moved from selling individual products to creating bundles and subscriptions. The world of one-off connections and discrete services gave way to packages that combined broadband, mobile, and TV.

The shift wasn’t smooth. Technology moved quickly, customer expectations shifted even faster, and companies struggled to keep pace. The companies that got it right weren’t those with the flashiest product. They were the ones who learned to combine things into an offer that felt coherent to the customer.

Looking back to look forward

At the time, I wouldn’t have imagined those ideas would resurface in energy. But they have. Today, we’re seeing a very similar shift. Homes are filling with new technologies: EV chargers, batteries, rooftop solar, heat pumps, smart tariffs. What used to be one monthly bill is becoming dozens of daily interactions.

The parallels to telecoms are clear. In both sectors, the pattern has been similar: things start fragmented, and then they come together. In telecoms, it was voice, data, and TV converging. In energy, it’s home devices, tariffs, and services. Both industries began as utilities, and both faced the same challenge: turn a commodity into an experience.

That is why, when we started Powerverse, we designed it as an end-to-end platform. We didn’t want to stitch together separate pieces later. We wanted to anticipate convergence and build for it from the outset.

The same questions, a new context

When I speak with energy companies today, I hear the same worries I used to hear from telecoms. How do we make customer experiences seamless? How do we get to market quickly? How do we stay flexible as technology and regulation keep changing?

It reminds me that while industries change, human psychology doesn’t change that much. Whether it’s telecoms or energy, customers want things to be easy. They want relevance — solutions that fit their lives at the right moment. And they want trust — the confidence that the car will charge overnight or the service won’t fail at the crucial moment.

What mattered then still matters now: ease, relevance, and trust. Those are the things that keep customers loyal.

Why this is relevant today

In our webinar this week, I revisited some of these ideas with James Hebblethwaite from Accenture, who has spent his career in telecoms. The conversation confirmed the parallels: energy is now where telecoms was twenty years ago. The same patterns are playing out, only faster.

This is why now is the right moment to bring these lessons forward. Energy businesses will need to decide how to respond. Stitching systems together can work for a while, but it risks creating fragmentation. Starting with a platform that’s built for coherence gives a different path.

At Powerverse, that’s the choice we made early. Not because it was the simplest route, but because I had seen what happens when you delay. The industry is moving quickly. Customers are already demanding more. The right time to get this right is now.

And Finally…

For me, looking back is less about nostalgia and more a way of being honest about what we’ve already learned, and how those lessons can serve us today. Telecoms showed me that success doesn’t come from a single breakthrough product. It comes from connecting things into an experience that people trust.

That’s the thread we followed when we designed Powerverse. In this case, the past has turned out to be a useful guide to the future.