Pacific Gas & Electric saves millions each year by automating business processes with Power Platform

For PG&E, the move to Power Platform was driven by an ambitious automation goal. “We felt there was a ton of value to be had throughout our organization in terms of streamlining and automating a lot of low-value work, and re-dedicating people in the organization to doing high-value work,” says Mark Seveska, Executive Sponsor, IT Products and Enterprise Solutions, PG&E.

Power Platform turned out to be the ideal solution. “We chose Microsoft Power Platform because it not only provided us with a secure, scalable platform for automation but enabled our business users to actually build their own solutions,” says Thomas Bilbo, Principal, Product Owner at PG&E.

By supporting both advanced Digital Creators and new citizen developers, PG&E has achieved some impressive results. In just four years, PG&E has created more than 2,000 Power Apps applications and 4,200 Power Automate cloud flows which drive more than 315 business solutions. Together, these solutions save the organization almost 527,000 hours annually, generating almost $75 million in savings each year. (Annualized savings based on hours and overall time needed to resolve).

Scaling success with a Center of Excellence  

Establishing a Center of Excellence early on was key to PG&E’s success in rapidly adopting Power Platform and deploying solutions. Through their Digital Productivity Center of Excellence (CoE), a small CoE team led by just three employees has enabled 1,300 advanced Digital Creators and trained over 3,000 citizen developers. The team connects with these developers multiple times a month and organizes regular training and events.

Participation is growing rapidly. A recent Power Platform conference drew over 300 attendees—double the number as last year’s event. What’s driving the enthusiasm? Strong executive support is one reason. “Our CEO has created a positive work culture that really values innovation,” says Gogerman. “These events give employees a chance to share what’s possible using Power Platform and inspire other innovative ideas.”

Along with supporting new makers, the CoE team can develop solutions on demand—such as a dashboard for an executive or a more advanced enterprise solution. Using the CoE Starter Kit available through Microsoft, the CoE team has created a dashboard that tracks the ROI of each application.

The CoE has also enabled PG&E to scale its development efforts without compromising security or quality. With Managed Environments, the team is able to monitor data protection, apply best practices, and create sandbox environments for testing. “Security is very important to us, especially as a public utility company,” says Eric Soria, Principal Product Owner at PG&E. “With our Center of Excellence, we're able to bring governance and structure to Power Platform development and protect our data.”

Chatbot saves $1.1 million annually on helpdesk support

One of the first groups to benefit from Power Platform development was PG&E’s Technology Service Center. As with many other organizations, PG&Es helpdesk agents were often burdened with mundane and repetitive requests that led to increased wait times for workers and reduced overall productivity. 

A powerful chatbot named “Peggy” (a wordplay on “PG&E”) changed all of that. Built using Microsoft Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents), Peggy can directly answer employees’ questions or redirect them to a specific resource. 

Today, 25%-40% of help desk demand is now fulfilled by Peggy. This has significantly optimized agent workloads and provided sizeable labor savings and service level improvements. Together, these optimizations save the company more than $1.1 million annually. Peggy has also given agents more time to focus on issues that required human intervention—which has improved the overall service level for their customers. 

An excellent example of Peggy’s powerful support capabilities is how it assists new users to login into Citrix for the first time. The chatbot recognizes trigger phrases and asks targeted questions regarding a user’s login device. It then provides basic instructions and links to additional documentation- all without having to contact the help desk.

Peggy’s ability to support SAP access requests is equally impressive. PG&E’s help desk team receives over 4,200 calls a year from users who need to unlock their access to SAP systems. Peggy has automated the end-to-end SAP account unlock request process - which alone saves the team 840 hours per year.

Jumping ahead with generative AI

While the AI capabilities in Power Platform are relatively new, PG&E has been actively working with the technology since it was introduced in preview. Today, the company is at the forefront of AI-driven innovation on the platform. Take the recent updates to Peggy the chatbot, for example. Using generative answers in Microsoft Copilot Studio, Peggy will soon be able to access the company’s knowledge based automatically and return answers back to more questions—no scripting required. 

Similar AI-driven innovations are being developed across the company, including an AI-driven flow in Power Automate that helps manage service calls. The solution was recently developed to handle a rapidly growing wave of customers that need equipment related to their conversion to solar energy. Using AI Builder in Power Automate, an AI model was added to a cloud flow that pulls relevant information from customer request forms and structures this information for processing in a separate service scheduling system. The system is projected to save up to an hour per form in manually processing time—with thousands of forms processed monthly. 

Yet another example: an AI model being built using AI Builder in Power Apps that translates training materials into multiple languages. While the materials will still be reviewed and proofread by a translator, the AI-driven translation support will save an estimated $7,000 per course. With 100 courses a year, the savings are significant. 

Power Platform is not only making it easier to bring AI-driven innovations into the company. Security has also been an important factor. As Bilbo explains, “Power Platform enables us to carefully control the data that feeds our AI models and, through Active Directory and Dataverse, also control who can access which data through those models.”

More developers, more exciting solutions

Looking ahead, PG&E’s success with Power Platform is set to grow even further. Training and nurturing citizen developers will continue to be key drivers for this growth. PG&E has a goal to rapidly train another 1,000 PG&E employees to be Digital Creators. 

The Center of Excellence team is also nurturing new ideas through hackathons, including its recent AI Odessey event. Like their Power Platform conference, attendance at this hackathon has doubled in size since last year. “Attendees have been absolutely fascinated at how AI in Power Platform can be used to solve their business challenges—and how easy it can be to turn concepts into real solutions,” says Bilbo. 

The team has no doubt that the ideas coming out of events like this will drive even more impressive cost savings. But as the team is also eager to point out, the company’s success with Power Platform goes well beyond metrics. “With Power Platform, we’re not only saving money, we’re helping drive a renewed joy of innovation across the company,” says Gogerman.