Published on the 04/12/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

Strategically aligned, people oriented and no AI PoCs…

“There’s a bit of a recurring theme in everything we do,” says Ed Hyde Genesis Energy’s chief technology and transformation officer. “We are very, very deliberate in being able to draw the linkage between our activity, even down at the project level, back up to our corporate strategy and making sure everything is strategically aligned.”

For Hyde that alignment, along with a focus on being ‘people orientated’ are non-negotiable. It underpins a multi-year ‘very complex’ technology delivery program designed to support its Gen35 corporate strategy, which focuses on the customer, the transition to renewables and creating the flexibility required to create energy solutions for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing – one challenge to having more renewable energy in the system.

“The risk with too much proof of concepts and experimentation is you end up doing interesting things that are not necessarily valuable things”

Hyde’s technology strategy, which includes both IT and OT strategies, lines up with the corporate strategy. “They’re absolutely hand in glove,” he tells iStart.

The technology strategy covers maintaining a safe stable environment, delivering major technology projects to support the business, and leveraging data and AI to run the business, and assets, as effectively as possible.

As one of New Zealand’s largest integrated energy companies, operating as both a generator and retailer of electricity, natural gas and LPG, Genesis currently has three major IT projects on the go to support its Gen35 strategy: A billing and CRM migration, and ERP upgrade and a modernisation program focused on its suite of wholesale and trading tools.

ERP upgrade: Enabling investment decision

The ERP program, branded Powered Finance, is central to Genesis’ ability to manage its billion-dollar investment in new generation capabilities.

The company’s legacy Oracle FMS service, which supports its general ledger – IBM TM1 is used for planning and forecasting, with SuccessFactors in the HR domain – is due to go out of support.

The company is now in the system integration testing phase for its move to Workday, with the final decision on the forecasting and planning tool still to be made.

Hyde tells iStart the benefits case extends beyond modernisation and lifecycle management: “It is no longer relevant to business case a piece of modernisation just on the fact you need to move to something more current. You have to be very clear about the benefits case and the benefits realisation, so there was a lot of work in the early stages around how we transform our finance function to support our Gen35 strategy.”

Hyde says the new ERP will help provide accurate, timely financial insights and improve decision making for capital allocation.

“We are spending over a billion dollars in new generation investment and where the finance platform becomes really important is in allowing us to navigate that complexity with relative ease to make sure we really understand our financial position quickly and accurately and equally importantly to ensure we make really great investment decisions.”

The program has been live for just over 12 months, with the vast majority of the build work now completed.

Data mapping, data models and integration points – the straddling of the old world into the new world – have provided the most complexity, Hyde says.

“We’re moving methodically through each of these integrations with a clear data model documented up front and a very robust systems integration test and user acceptance process.”

Amplifying business success

Another project sees Genesis moving form an old version of Gentrack for billing and a ‘slightly old’ Salesforce environment to Gentrack’s new cloud-based G2 billing engine with Salesforce’s electricity and utility platform.

The migration, currently around 50 percent complete, covers all customer segments, from mass market, small to medium size enterprise through to industrial, and is being delivered in phases. The first phase went live in October and included the first release of Genesis’ simple electricity products. Gas and LPG, then complex business will be added in the next two phases.

Hyde says the project will enable pricing innovation, including the ability to offer attractive retail pricing and faster introduction of new services, such as Genesis’ recently introduced broadband. It’s also expected to provide cost-to-serve optimisation through automation and streamlining of customer processes.

Rounding out the trifecta of projects underway is Project Amplify, a multi-faceted wholesale and trading tools modernisation designed to amplify margins and products in the wholesale and trading space.

“We are modernising some of our derivatives and trading tools, upgrading our risk management platforms and building a series of algorithms and data sets to support enhanced trading in the future.”

Building delivery capability

Executing the programs has required Genesis to strengthen its delivery capability.

“The size and scale of the delivery program and the high volume of change coming is means we really needed to build out our muscle to be capable of delivering a large program of technology work with lots of interdependencies and complexity,” Hyde says.

The company operates a hybrid model, calling on the skills of partners who can bring in global best practice.

Hyde notes that the industry-wide shift toward scaled agile practices has created a challenge: A dilution of traditional program management skills, making it hard to find complex program delivery skills.

“One of the by-products of lots of investment by organisations into scaled agile and agile development practices has been a reduction in the availability and depth of capability around more traditional program management.”

While Genesis embraces agile where appropriate, Hyde stresses the need for balance. “There’s a strong case for agile, but equally for the more traditional waterfall delivery models. Managing the balance between those models is critical.”

He notes that resourcing continues to be a top priority for him in his role: “Making sure we’ve actually got the right capability to support our aspirations is really something that’s front of mind.”

Also front of mind – tablestakes, in fact – is keeping the environment safe, stable and secure. It’s an area however, where Hyde is, understandably, reluctant to be drawn to comment. The ‘big rock’ technology programs and execution of Genesis’ data and AI strategy are also key.

AI

That third pillar of Genesis’ technology strategy, data and AI, have seen the company partner with OpenAI around ChatGPT for enterprise and with Databrick for its data platform environment, which also incorporates a training academy.

“Those two key relationships, with a very people-orientated change wrapper, have been a real focus,” Hyde says.

ChatGPT for enterprise has been rolled out to more than 80 percent of the organisation, with OpenAI noting that uptake and engagement numbers are some of the best they’ve seen.

The company has also adopted the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to modernise its data ecosystem and accelerate the use of AI applications and agents across the organisation, enabling it to democratise access to data and AI and drive enterprise-wide transformation with intelligent asset management, AI-assisted trading, enhanced customer experiences and generative AI-enabled productivity.

“With Databricks, we are accelerating the ability to embed data and AI in the way we operate, innovate and support customers, while ensuring our people are empowered with the skills to thrive in this new era,” Hyde says.

The company is already seeing use cases with strong benefits. In the generation space it’s using AI on top of its standard operating procedures and operational metrics to help engineers prioritise work on generation assets.

“That’s helping map out the highest value work and we’re seeing efficiency opportunities in the order of 50 percent reduction in effort in working through some of the work in the generation asset space.”

In the people and culture domain, a People Pal agent is enabling employees to ask questions about Genesis’ people policies and internal processes.

“And a third area would be in the enterprise business helping our account management teams prepare for customer meetings and customer calls – looking at some of our customers’ latest news announcements, looking at their strategies, looking at the products that they buy, to help support better account management conversations.

“That’s just three out of literally hundreds of different use cases and they show that it is relevant right across the organisation, so we’re really excited.”

Proof of concept-free

One differentiator for Genesis, however, might be its approach to AI.

“We don’t run proof of concepts,” Hyde says. “We identify high-value opportunities, rate those opportunities really simply around size of the value opportunity and ease of being able to chase them down, and we’re just going to run a really great process to start to progress through the programs of work with a streamlined business casing process on the back end.”

That business casing process includes a one-page template for a high-level business case and a minimum 15 percent per annum return on investment.

“So we’ve got a very clear ROI hurdle that these ideas need to get above before we progress any further. And that’s working really well for us, it’s really anchored in value creation,” he says.

For Hyde, that bias for operationalising opportunities is key with AI. “The risk with too much proof of concepts and experimentation is you end up doing interesting things that are not necessarily valuable things.”