Save on the electricity bill with Artificial Intelligence

The Big Data and the cloud are the tools used by the Madrid company Podo to know the exact consumption of each client and improve it

      The receipt of the water, the shopping basket, the electricity bill, the gas bill, the mortgage ... These are some of the monthly expenses of the Spanish families that leave the bank's account shivering in the first days of the month .

Consumer organizations, price comparators and offers are the tricks to lower this amount. However, technology has shown itself to be an ally when it comes to lowering electricity and gas bills or, at least, that is what Podo , an independent Spanish energy trader , thinks .

      In Spain there are 29.2 million electricity supply points and 7.7 million gas supply points (data at the end of 2017). «We collect all the consumption records of Spanish households. We created an algorithm that predicts for each house in the country the consumption of electricity that will be next year and how much will be paid each month, "says Jorge Capilla to Innova +, CEO of Podo.

Podo is the first of its segment that operates and is managed entirely in the cloud. Google and Cloudera have distinguished it as a success story because of its innovative infrastructure and its use of data and artificial intelligence. "We are at an error rate below 1%," says Capilla.

Born in Madrid in 2016, the independent marketer has 10 people on staff: "Everything is very optimized." Their bet to differentiate themselves from competitors is in technology: "It's a change of cultural mentality."

The algorithm predicts the consumption of light that each household will have and how much it will pay for it next year

With this technology, Podo calculates what the light consumption of a home will be during a whole year and what will be the saving in its bill with respect to its current supplier. «We let pay a fixed fee based on our algorithm and if it is consumed less it is returned with a 3% interest. The mistake costs us money, "says Capilla.

A business based on Google's cloud and with its own algorithm powered by historical consumption, power, tariff and information related to supply. "If someone knows how to use Excel, they can use this tool," he explains. "At no time I ask how many people live, we do not take any personal data, they are just patterns".

In addition, Big Data allows users to set alerts and set consumption limits. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the user can control consumption and see if he is spending more than the average calculated by Podo.

Cost reduction
The use of technology is not only applied to reduce the user's rate, but also the costs of the marketer. According to the data of the National Commission of the Markets and the Competition (CNMC), the Spanish consumers value the electrical service as the worst within the basic services. "Podo seeks to respond to this dissatisfaction of users with large energy companies, which still account for 85% of the market despite liberalization, making the procurement and consumption of energy something easy and accessible to all," says the company it's a statement.

The interaction with the nearly 20,000 users that the marketer has is a mine of information. "All the interaction is through a natural processor of language and analysis of sentiment that gives a note and that reflects how important that interaction is and how satisfied the client is", explain the people in charge of Podo.

A task, so far, made by people on the other side of the phone and that in the case of these small SMEs have been replaced by artificial intelligence and personalized analysis. "So we can provide specific products," adds Capilla.

A cost saving to work with artificial intelligence, but that entails great efforts in the learning of these tools, because "all interactions go through dictionaries of synonyms and antonyms until finding the word and then give degrees of satisfaction."

The Center for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI) has also recognized the innovative nature of Podo by granting it a long-term loan to finance its investment in technological development.