There's a guy in your basement right now. He's hunched over a laptop, building impossibly complex Excel spreadsheets. And here's the kicker—without him, your entire energy company stops working.

Gorilla CEO Ruben Van den Bossche dropped this uncomfortable truth at the Energy Thought Summit 2025 in Texas, and the room went dead silent. Not because it was shocking, but because everyone recognized the situation in that basement.

The uncomfortable reality check

While the energy industry obsesses over AI futures and digital transformation roadmaps, most companies are still fundamentally running on software that's 10-20 years old. 

The problem isn't that legacy systems exist. The problem is what happens when you throw modern data volumes at software built for a different era. You get data silos where sales forecasts don't match hedging forecasts. Where costs don’t add up between sales, billing and settlement. Decision-making crawls to a halt precisely when markets are moving faster than ever.

Ruben detailed one example that summed it up perfectly: a Gorilla customer discovered millions in margin leakage just by getting a proper view of their data. Not through some revolutionary AI breakthrough: just by finally seeing what was actually happening in their business.

The real cost of Excel dependency

Here's what's actually happening in those basements: energy professionals are manually stitching together data from CRM systems, CIS platforms, and trading applications that were never designed to talk to each other. They're building bespoke pricing models in spreadsheets when they should be using actual consumption data to forecast and price at the individual customer level.

The result? One customer completely changed their business strategy after implementing proper portfolio analysis. They withdrew from an entire market segment and overhauled their risk profile. Revenue dropped 20%, but EBITDA increased four-fold. That's not a typo—they quadrupled their profitability by actually understanding their business.

Why this matters now more than ever

The energy market isn't getting less volatile. If anything, the pace of change is accelerating, and the only competitive advantage is agility. Companies that can launch new products in hours instead of months will eat the lunch of those still filing IT change requests.

But you can't build agility on top of Excel spreadsheets and 20-year-old transactional systems. You need margin intelligence at the core, not as an afterthought.

The path forward

This isn't about ripping out every system and starting from scratch. It's about recognizing that retail energy management has fundamentally become a data processing problem. The winners will be companies that can move from that Excel basement to real-time forecasting at a range of granularities and customer-specific pricing.

But it’s not just AI. It's about building the data foundation that makes real agility possible. Because in a world where the only constant is change, the companies still driving Ford Fiestas aren't going to keep up with the highway traffic.

Time to get out of the basement.