There are easier times to run an energy retailer. Between market volatility, endless regulatory changes, and the general turmoil of AI & world events, the people who manage margin at energy retailers are working harder than ever to stay ahead. Which is exactly why we brought them together.

2 weeks ago we hosted The Energy Edge: Margin by Design. It was a day built around a single question: in a market where so much is outside your control, what can you actually do? The answer was the thread running through every session.

What we heard

The day opened with a keynote from Simon Evans, Global Digital Energy Leader at Arup, on why the sector's biggest unlock isn't a new product but better foundations, and why that's a problem of people and process as much as technology. It set a tone that kept resurfacing all day.

That carried into our front-line panel, where Daisy Cross (Head of Future Retail Markets, Energy UK), Simon Gill (Director of Pricing, British Gas Business), and Ben Dugauquier (Director, Baringa) got candid about why margin-visibility projects succeed or fail. The panel covered a broad range of themes, with MHHS exposure risk, flexibility service providers & margin disintermediation, and cultural alignment being some of the most prominent.

"It used to be that if things moved 50p per megawatt-hour, that was quite a big day. Now you're going, 'Oh, five pounds, it doesn't matter.'" — Simon Gill

Our CEO Ruben Van den Bossche closed out the morning with a talk on building for permanent uncertainty rather than waiting for calm that isn't coming. His framing stuck:

"Radical uncertainty is now the only thing you can really be sure of."

He also covered the increased industry exposure for the new category created by Gorilla, Energy Margin Intelligence.

Then the lightning talks picked up the pace. Gorilla Data Ranger Elke made the case that AI in energy is only as good as the data foundation beneath it. Carl Haigney of Capgemini argued that the "agentic utility" is closer than most of the sector assumes, and posed a challenge about how fast organisations are really moving toward it. And Gorilla VP of Customer Willem offered a provocation about where the industry's commercial model is heading next that had people talking well into the coffee break. Willem's big point: the energy industry is entering a period of 'rebundling'. Most industries have gone through periods of bundling products and operations, unbundling them, and then rebundling as technology allowed, and the energy industry looks to be following the same pattern.

Finally, Joris Van Genechten took the room under the hood, showing how this all comes together in practice, including a live look at how an AI agent can read, explain, and act on real pricing workflows inside the platform, with advances in reasoning leading to a step change in capability.

Beyond the stage

The afternoon moved into hands-on workshops and demo time, which is where a lot of the day's best discussions actually happened. And yes, the raffle landed someone a Michelin-starred dinner, which we're told softened the journey home considerably.

What's next

If there was one takeaway, it's that margin is something you design for from the outset. Several of the ideas raised on the day deserve more than a paragraph, so over the coming weeks we'll be unpacking the ones that drew the most debate: the future commercial model, the metrics that should anchor it, and what an AI-native margin platform really looks like in practice.

We'll be back in November with our next event and a few answers to the questions we left open. Fill in the form below to be the first to know about all the details of our November event: