What Ai Actually Means For Energy Analysts Right Now

[music] [music]

Okay, so we’ve come to the end of our first ever summer sessions 2020 first ever summer sessions full stop. And um this is a bit of a remarkable event for us because um you’ll notice that the room’s been full the whole time. And we actually we gave away 800 tickets to this event and we had almost double that apply for tickets. So we actually had to turn away about half the people to come. And so when you book an event like this, you don’t really imagine that we you walk into a room like this and you think, “Wow, this is enormous, you know.” Um you don’t really imagine that you’re going to be turning away twice the same amount of people again to come. And so I put my um I asked you all to raise your hands at the beginning and say who is here for the first time. And um when I reflect on the fact that we’ve got 800 people at this event and another 800 who would like to come, um it’s incredible. I mean, I remember 10 years ago when you could get the whole energy storage community in the back room of a pub. In fact, I remember being in some of those pubs with some of you in this room. And look at us now. It’s just phenomenal how much this this industry has grown. And when I think about why that has happened, I think it’s because this asset class is now a bankable asset class. What is that What What is that? What does that mean? It means that battery energy storage is now held by some of the largest, most um um influential and impactful asset managers in the world. Um if you look at global battery storage additions in gigawatt, I mean, remarkable that we did 87 gigawatts last year. And we think we’re going to do 130 plus in 2026. So globally this thing is really it’s just starting to snowball. And And wherever Michael is, he talked about earlier when he was at BNEF, there was this tiny bit uh and that was really exciting. Well, we’re crazy as this is, we’re still early as well when you think about how much um energy markets are going to change with batteries. And then if we think about capital flows, so last year um 700 billion pounds was um was capital was moved into renewables and storage projects and bringing assets online, 700 billion pounds, and we expect that to be 1.3 trillion pounds by the end of the decade. And so I talk a lot with our team at Modo about what is our purpose, you know, what Why do we even bother? And I think we’re very aligned with you in this room. I think we all have the same purpose, which is about making sure that that number gets allocated efficiently and effectively into the right projects, um so that the kind of assets that are really going to have impact for the grid, but most importantly, the ones that are going to deliver uh predictable and acceptable returns for shareholders and investors. Because whilst it’s great to be at a conference like this and you know, uh everyone’s buzzing, really the only thing that matters is that we’re we’re we’re delivering shareholder value. And that’s the thing that keeps the flywheel spinning to make to so we can make more bets and allocate more capital and really have the impact that we want to do in decarbonization. So um I talked to our team a lot about, you know, you can talk about decarbonization being the purpose and whatever and that’s great, but really our job is about capital being moved efficiently and if we get that bit right, um then the rest will follow. Um okay. Modo has been on it So we talk about this community being on a bit of a journey, and we’ve been on a journey, too. In fact, some of some of the faces I can see in this audience have been on this journey with Modo for supporting us and being our customers and whatever it’s from when we were just a few people in an office in Birmingham to what we are now, and it’s been a it’s been wonderful to work with you all. We now have over 200 customers around the world, 200 subscribers, including some of the biggest energy companies in the world. And we just crossed a really important milestone for our business that we now have over 30,000 active users of the Modo Energy Terminal. Um a few more milestones for our business. We’re now live in 15 regions around the world in three continents. Um and so if you asked us 3 years ago, that would have been two regions. So, we’ve been going as quickly as we can for global coverage and we expect to be in 25 regions by the end of 2027. We’re now in five markets in Europe, almost coast to coast in US, give us a few more weeks, and um and of course in Australia as well. And one of the key things about our business is I talked earlier about the fact that we do model reviews. Model reviews are a very important part of how we build and distribute and sell um forecasts and models. And we often find that as we enter new markets, um and essentially it’s still me and my co-founder’s team that do all of the final model reviews. We often put the brakes on models in releasing new markets um because they’re not ready because ultimately, as the challenger in this space, we have to be 10 times um better than the incumbents and that all comes from trust. Um speaking of trust, after years of work, this year we announced um we’d like to announce we’re the first and only FCA-regulated provider of benchmarks for batteries in the entire world. And um we’re really proud of this, but I think that I think the thing that I’m most proud of is how we’re already seeing a lot more innovation on top of these. So, we’re seeing lots of our customers and um folks in the market now building really interesting financial um contracts and derivatives on top of assets using a FCA-regulated benchmark like the ME Bes industry benchmarks. So, we’re seeing swaps, tolling agreements, floor agreements, even um in um insurance underwriting against this as well. And we’re really excited to see how the market progresses now there is a reliable FCA-regulated benchmarks to do that. And then on the forecast side, forecasting valuations. Many of Many of you will know that in our early days, we were just a benchmarking business and when started forecasting 3 and 1/2 years ago, and we’ve gone from strength to strength, and this year we’ve done 3 billion pounds of financings with clients, and we expect that to 3 billion pounds of assets have been financed using our curves and forecasts, and we expect that to be over 10 billion next year. So, we really are going at this very quickly, and we’re very delighted to be supporting many of you in in this audience with debt raises and whatnot. Um Okay, blank slide. This is where I talk about talk about the future of Modo. So, um this is we’re our company’s going through the biggest change in our history. You’re going to see things all over the wall about code. I’m going to talk about that in a second. But really, um everything is changing about our business. And if we just take stock about what we’ve done in the last 7 years, um really we came along and we looked at the legacy consultancies. So, many of the big-name companies that you know in this room. And this entire industry for the last couple of decades has been very reliant on consultancies. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, you know. So, for market intelligence, valuations, really we’ve to get assets built with the the industry has needed consultancies. Um and we came along and we we thought that’s that that works, but kind of. Um and we thought there’s some problems with this model with the fact that um you have black box models for example in forecasts. We wanted to be radically transparent. Um the problem there’s there’s a cycle time issue. Um everything is an Excel sheet and a PDF, and things take a long time and cost a lot of money. So, we thought we’re going to try and improve that model. And so, at Modo we tried to build this, which is our current model. And this was all about um automating some of this work. Okay, not all of it, but automating some of it, standardizing it, and doing it in a radically transparent way. Um and we’re really really proud of what we’ve done in in doing that. Um but this wasn’t actually a fundamental change. And we think this industry is ready for a fundamental change and the stars have aligned on this one. Um so before I talk to you about that, I guess the thing I want to say is that the consultancy era is over. It’s over for us, but we also think it’s over for the market because technology is allowing us to do much more much more special things with our customers, um which I’m going to talk about in a second. But the consultancy era is finished. Okay. Let me talk about AI for a second. AI is changing every industry. It is a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world now since especially since December. I don’t know if any of you have Many of us spent basically the whole Christmas holidays talking to our computers. Um certainly since the models came out from Anthropic in December, the whole world has changed, right? And we’ve been working on AI at Modo for the last 18 months. And the things that have changed is we have better foundational models. We have much better context management, much better harnesses for these models, and crucially, um we can build agents that do the work for us. And so this is helping us completely rethink what the role of an energy professional is, or the role of an asset manager is, or the role of an optimizer is, and how we do our our jobs. Um and the way that we think about this is like a pre-chat GPT and a post-chat GPT world. You’ll notice there is actually a Gemini [laughter] a whole mark on there. You’ll have to excuse that. Um and so this totally changes the surface area about what we can be as a business and the kind of value that we can provide to our customers. And so as we’re in this new post-chat GPT world, um we call this era the uh the era of agentic energy analytics. And I’m going to talk to you a bit more about what that means. Um but this is a huge huge change for our business. Um and that was a huge huge change for this industry, as well. And so, we imagine a world where the um the work a lot of the work that’s done by people in this room is done by agents. And um that doesn’t mean uh the doomer idea of the fact that AI is going to take everybody’s jobs. We just think that the world is going to be very different, and a lot of the boring work will be taken away to free us up for other other things. Um and crucially, we’re already all of us seeing improvements in our efficiency with AI. But agentic and energy analytics, this is reshaping what an analyst can be and what an energy professional can be. So, what does all this mean? What does all this mean? Okay, there’s a lot of like uh pie-in-the-sky stuff. Let’s let’s get down to to the actual details. So, this is going to resonate with a lot of people in this room. As energy analysts, and I still consider myself an analyst, as analysts, we spend too much of our time doing this stuff, the 80%. This is pulling numbers out of a load of spreadsheets. This is reformatting that same board pack again or redoing that report, that monthly report or weekly report for management. This is waiting on that one analyst in the corner of the office that has that niche context around that certain asset. Right? And that the problem with this is you only actually have 20% of your time to do the stuff that we all come to work to do. This is the 80%. This was never the job. This was never the job. The job is the 20%, the judgment, the decisions, and the part that actually moves the needle on um moving our businesses forward. And so, at Motus, we think this is totally the wrong way around. Totally the wrong way around. And we imagine a future where this is flipped. And that future is Co. Now, we’ve been building Co, uh an AI energy analyst, for the last 18 months. And for the first 6 months, it was a side project that we were moonlighting with some of our engineers on the weekends and nights. And over time we thought, ah, we do actually have something here. And then we released it to our subscribers just after Christmas in beta. And today we we Co can do a lot more than it could even six months ago. The thing about Co though, and I talked to you earlier about we’ve got 30,000 users of Modo Energy’s terminal. Of that 30,000, 25% of them are now three months after launch, 25% of them are weekly active users of Co, and 20% are daily active users of Co. Okay, so Co usage across our customers is going through a huge huge curve of adoption. And also we we announced MCP a few weeks ago, and we’re seeing the same adoption MCP. In fact, in in the UK and Germany we’re seeing the highest usage of MCP across the world. So we have some real AI filled people in the UK. But Co is an amazing energy analyst right now. You ask it a question, and it will give you an incredible answer grounded in all that Modo knows and all of our data, right? But that is not the thing to get excited about because the Co that we’re building, and we’re not yet there yet, but we’re getting there, the Co that we’re building will you give it a task, it takes that task, writes a plan, will run the forecast, do the analysis, and produce your investment committee paper, and check its own answers and give it back to you. That’s the Co that we’re building. And so if you have you’re making a decision about augmenting a two-hour system to a four-hour system, Co needs to go and do that work, so you’re freed up to figure out what your team needs and use your judgment and make decisions and let the busy work go to someone else. So this is the Co that we’re building. Some of it is live now, and some of it is coming, but we’re going extremely fast. In fact, we’ve totally redesigned our business around this. And the first six months of this year have been one of the most rewarding, incredible, crazy, exciting years uh 6 months I’ve ever done at work because of this. And the thing about Co isn’t it compounds. So, the question isn’t really what can Co do today? It is imagine what Co can do with another 12 months of compounding with everyone at Modo feeding Co more data, more context, and more tooling so Co can do way more incredible things for you. And so, this comes back to this. We’re aiming for a world where it’s the 80% of your jobs is doing the stuff that you love, right? The judgment, the decisions, and the part that matters. And none of this, none of this matters without trust, right? We talk about trust all the time in our business. And everything we build at Modo is enterprise grade. So, we talked a lot about the fact we’ve just been through the FCA regulation process. We are now held to the same standards on impartiality, on uh governance, and on audit trail. We are held to the same standards as Bloomberg, MSCI, S&P, and Reuters. Okay? This This is serious stuff, and we we have been through 2 and 1/2 years of getting to this point. And the point that I’m trying to make here is our AI that we’re building follows exactly the same uh standards as everything else that we’re doing. So, we are building with security in mind. And I I do want to talk about humans for a second, right? Because there is there is this doomer idea that AI is going to come and take everyone’s jobs, and that’s not the point. We do not subscribe to that. In fact, we are hiring more analysts and engineers than we’ve ever done before at a faster rate than before. And we think about this as increasing the surface area of the the work that we can do as energy professionals. So, all of our analysts and engineers are now training Co. If you took a a 40-hour week of our team and divvied it up by how much time they spend training our AI now, they’re spending more than half their time training our AI. And a lot of the work that we produced is built by co. We We are the biggest users of co in internally in our business. And so, because we’re doing that, it’s called because we’re kind of eating the dog food, we are iterating and iterating and iterating hour by hour and building agents ourselves with co that can go and do remarkable things. And what that means is we’re seeing new roles created at Modo where our analysts now are starting to become power We call power market engineers. And their primary job is training our AI that we want to put in the hands of our customers so you can get that 80% back. Okay. So, that’s a lot of me telling you what co can do. But now, I’m going to prove it. Welcome to Modo Energy. Over 10,000 energy professionals [music] at 200 organizations across 30 countries rely on Modo Energy’s bankable AI native intelligence [music] to value the world’s renewable energy assets across every stage of the asset life cycle from greenfield to grid. Built to the standards institutional capital demands, three pillars [music] of investment grade intelligence, bankable forecasts, regulated benchmarks, and insights [music] from power market analysts cited by the financial press the world reads. Explore the terminal and ask co, [music] our AI native analyst. Build through the API or connect through MCP into the tools your team already uses every day. Underwriting a new deal, pull an instant [music] bankable forecast in the terminal. And with co, interrogate [music] the methodology and challenge every input. Ask, “How did the NEM forecast handle the retirement of coal plants [music] in Victoria?” Or, “How does the The forecast solar’s impact on ERCOT battery spreads over the next decade. [music] And in seconds, Co answers. With every number grounded in Modo Energy’s power market modeling and methodology, [music] instant due diligence without a consultant. When you’re moving into a new market, ask Co to compare policy [music] changes, market economics, and everything in between. For example, [music] ask, “I’m thinking of building a solar site in Europe. Show me a cross-market comparison of everything I need to know.” And Co synthesizes thousands of research pieces from Modo Energy’s analysts on the ground into a market [music] entry briefing in seconds. Every claim sourced back to the analyst who wrote it. You can also connect Modo Energy into the tools [music] your team already uses. Through MCP, pull the latest forecast straight into [music] your Excel model, draft an IC memo in Word, or pull Modo Energy’s regulated benchmarks straight into your performance decks in PowerPoint. Investment-grade intelligence where the work actually happens. Modo [music] Energy. Bankable, AI-native intelligence for the world’s energy assets. And so, we’ve been putting this into the hands of our customers in beta and different levels for the last few months. And here’s some of the things that our customers say about it. These are real quotes, and we have tens and tens more just like this that we could have used. These are coming from emails from customers saying, “We really like what you’re doing.” Getting answers from a consultant or an advisor used to take days. Co gives me the answer in seconds. That’s from Scott at East Point Energy in the US. Co is precise and reliable, and that’s what sets it apart from other AI tools, which are often inaccurate but still confident. And that’s Rohe at Junex. And so, we’re excited today to announce that for all of our paying customers for a month, we are removing all usage limits on code and give you full access to all of code’s capabilities for the next month. And this is an opportunity for you to really push code to the limit. So integrate it into your Microsoft suite, integrate it into PowerPoint and into Excel. You can use Claude, you can use Copilot and start really pushing your token usage to see what you can get out of code. Try and break it. Okay, drive it like you stole it. This is what we want. And give us feedback on on what we can do better. Because what really matters for us is about compounding and we are going so quickly at this. We’re really excited about the next 12 months. So if you want to get started with code, we’ve got a code bar out there. You can set it up in the terminal and we can show you how to bring that into your Microsoft suite or your other operational surface. And so 12 months ago code wasn’t even a thing. Right? And now just imagine the next 12 months of operating and iterating at this speed. And so that sets the scene for the party. Okay, the party starts now. I want to say a huge thank you to everybody in this room for coming along and being part of this incredible community and asking so many thoughtful questions and and just being here. This is the first year that we’ve done a conference like this and I can imagine we’re probably going to have to do another one. And so what’s going to happen now? We’re going to get rid of these uh chairs and make it all party like and then we’re going to have a real party. Thank you all for your time and see you at the bar. [applause]