How AI solutions go hand in hand with the core idea at wattline and significantly enhance processes

Among the key competencies of energy purchasing association wattline are their innovation, progress and the aim to actively influence the future. As a result, Artificial Intelligence has been a central concern in the company since 2024, where it has quickly gained significant momentum. Several individual AI-Apps are currently used in different departments and continuously lead to substantially increased productivity and time savings.

Innovative thinking at the heart of wattline

Ever since its foundation in 1999 by Harald and Martin Praml, wattline has stood for innovation and a future-oriented approach. As the first independent energy purchasing association, wattline has been paving the way towards a free energy market and is currently represented everywhere on the German and Austrian market. What started as a minor project soon transformed into an association of about 200 employees that caters for more than 29,000 companies with a purchasing power in energy spendings that surpasses two billion Euros. The ambitious goal of providing energy as a predictable resource rather than an incalculable risk, however, has not changed since wattline’s early days. Nowadays, wattline is aiming to take the lead on the market for electricity and gas to become the main energy distributor in Europe. In order to achieve this goal, the key idea that a sense of community and clever strategies lead to better solutions has been central ever since and explains the ongoing success of wattline. Since its foundation, the association takes an active role in the development of present and future and open-mindedly approaches new technologies, which projects itself into the remarkable achievements in the energy sector wattline has been able to record.

From keynote to internal AI-community

Against the backdrop of its general orientation, wattline decided to integrate Artificial Intelligence on its agenda in 2024. At this point, the decision to work together with AI start-up synsugar arose and proved very fruitful in the following months due to equal key competencies of efficiency and well-functioning collaboration. Soon, the initiative was able to gain momentum.

At the beginning, it seemed important to provide room for initial impressions/instigations and to open the minds for notions of AI. The first collaboration between wattline and synsugar happened in the form of a keynote speech at an executive conference. The interest in AI technologies and possibilities rapidly expanded in the succeeding months and spread to different departments at wattline, which sparked multiple workshops, strategic consultation and trainings in prompt engineering. The goal was to provide a touchpoint with AI for both executives and interested employees and to discuss possibilities, potentials and dangers of this technology.

As a consequence of the increased interest in and contact with AI, an internal AI-community came into being at wattline. Consisting of many different employees from various departments, it provides room for a mutual exchange between wattline and synsugar, as well as allowing synsugar to regularly inform about recent developments in the world of AI.

AI-Keynote at wattline’s 25-year anniversary

The rapid adoption of interest in Artificial Intelligence manifested itself at the 25-year anniversary that wattline hosted in September 2024. At the heart of this special celebration, the association clearly suggested an orientation towards the future, especially with regard to new technologies. On behalf of synsugar, Sarah displayed how the future with AI might look like in her keynote speech. The goal was to provide an insight into the vast potentials of AI technologies, as well as to inspire the attendants to [become active agents for the future of AI]. This focus highlights wattline’s open-mindedness towards new technologies and underlines its agency in both present and future.

How custom AI-Apps facilitate daily processes at wattline

Apart from the keynote speech, the collaboration between wattline and synsugar in terms of AI-integration has been notably influenced by the development of different custom AI-Apps since the second half of 2024. Designed to suit wattline’s specific needs, these apps are developed by synsugar and then integrated into the respective processes. As soon as they are in place, synsugar continuously improves and iterates these apps to ensure that they provide optimum efficiency, thus saving significant resources.

Among these custom applications is an assistant that allows extracting structured output of complex pdf-documents which can then be used to build/generate a structured database. Especially the energy purchasing department profits remarkably, since the generated database provide users with clear and intelligible data when they need to use it for analyses which saves both time and effort.

Additionally, wattline has a custom assistant that is able to read EDIFACT-messages from the data in electricity meters at their disposal. The assistent is then able to extract the relevant information and provides it in a structured manner for the employees. As a result, mistakes that happen when transferring the data manually can be circumvented while employees have more time on their hands at the same time. Furthermore, employees who are not yet familiar with the format of EDIFACT benefit greatly from the clear and manageable depiction of data.

You want to similarly introduce Artificial Intelligence in your processes? We offer extensive AI-solutions that are tailored to your specific needs at the same time. Apart from custom applications, we provide companies with a corporate GPT, the synsugar AI Suite, that effortlessly connects with your internal data and allows for various opportunities to make full use of the potentials of AI technologies.