The energy industry has no shortage of technology ambitions; from AI-powered forecasting to increasingly sophisticated pricing engines, retailers are investing in the capabilities they believe will define their competitiveness over the next decade. But there’s a more immediate problem demanding attention.

Gorilla’s Energy Margin Intelligence Index, 2026 found that 42 per cent of UK energy retail leaders lack real-time visibility into their margins. That’s a significant blind spot for businesses operating in a market where the profitability of a contract can change long before it appears in a financial report.

It also raises an uncomfortable question: if retailers cannot see the margin they’re earning today, should building tomorrow’s technology really be the priority?

The hidden cost of building

The traditional build versus-buy debate centres on cost, control and customisation. Building in-house promises a solution tailored to the business, while buying offers specialist capabilities without the development burden. However, this comparison overlooks something vital: opportunity cost.

Every month spent developing a new pricing platform is another month in which commercial teams may be working with fragmented information, outdated assumptions and limited visibility into contract performance. And the cost isn’t confined to IT budgets. It extends to the pricing specialists, analysts and energy experts diverted into developed projects rather than improving commercial outcomes

The question isn’t simply how much a new platform will cost, it’s how much value the business could be missing while waiting for it.

Your competitive advantage isn’t your code

Energy retailers don’t compete on their ability to write software, they compete on their ability to price intelligently, manage risk, serve customers and protect profitability. Yet, all too often, specialist expertise becomes absorbed in maintaining the infrastructure needed to perform those activities. This is where the conversation needs to change.

Rather than asking whether an organisation has the resources to build a solution, leaders should ask whether building it is the best use of those resources. Specialist technology can accelerate access to capabilities that might otherwise take years to develop. More importantly, it can free commercial teams to focus on the decisions that actually determine profitability.

Of course, buying software doesn’t automatically solve fragmented data or disconnected teams. Technology must still be integrated into the business, with consistent assumptions and shared accountability but those are precisely the challenges retailers should be investing their time in solving.

From technology investment to margin intelligence

The ultimate measure of a technology investment isn’t how sophisticated the system becomes, it is what the organisation can do differently by adopting it. Can pricing teams understand the margin they’re committed to before signing a contract? Can trading identify emerging exposure? Can finance and commercial teams work from the same view of profitability? Can the business act while there’s still an opportunity to improve the outcome?

These are the questions at the heart of Energy Margin Intelligence. For retailers struggling with margin visibility, the priority shouldn’t be another lengthy development programme with benefits somewhere on the horizon, it should be connecting the information, expertise and decision that determine profitability today because the most expensive technology project may not be the one that runs over budget, it may be the one that delivers exactly what was promised, long after the business needed it.

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