If Coca-Cola Is Reimagining Customer Experience With Agentic AI, Should Utilities Be Doing the Same?
By Heather Siebken, Director, Councils & Marketing | 2-minute read
What can a global consumer brand teach the utility industry about the future of customer experience?
More than you might think.
The Coca-Cola Company is reimagining its operating model around agentic AI, not as another technology investment, but as a catalyst for better decisions, deeper customer understanding and more personalized engagement. Rather than treating AI as a standalone tool, Coca-Cola is embedding it into the way the business understands consumers, makes decisions, and delivers experiences.
The vision isn’t just theoretical. Across the Coca-Cola system, AI agents are already being deployed to deliver personalized support by securely accessing employee-specific information, answering questions in natural language, automating workflows and seamlessly escalating complex issues to people when needed. The result is a more intelligent, proactive, and personalized experience…not simply a better chatbot.
While utilities operate in a different environment, they face many of the same challenges: rising customer expectations, increasing pressure to personalize interactions, and a growing need to do more with limited resources. Imagine applying these same principles to utility customer experience: an AI agent that understands a customer’s rate plan, payment history, outage status, energy usage, and program eligibility, then proactively recommends solutions, completes transactions, or connects the customer to the right specialist with full context.
The question isn’t whether utilities will adopt AI. It’s whether they’ll use it to automate today’s processes or fundamentally rethink how they engage with customers.
That’s why we’re especially excited to welcome David Jacobson, Global Senior Director of Human Insights & Marketing Performance at The Coca-Cola Company, to EMACS. In “Agentic AI in Action: How Utilities Are Transforming the Customer Experience,” David will join utility leader Chris Davis from Consumers Energy to explore what one of the world’s most iconic brands has learned about combining AI, customer intelligence, and data-driven decision-making and what those lessons could mean for the future of utility customer experience.
Some of the best ideas don’t come from looking across the utility industry. They come from looking beyond it.
See What Your Peers Are Doing
Explore these Chartwell member resources to see how utilities are testing, implementing, and scaling AI across the customer experience.
- Customer Experience Leadership Council Spring Meeting2. Connexus Energy shares how they are using AI-enabled quality assurance tools, and DTE Energy presents on utilizing AI in damage claims.
- PG&E Case Study1. Read about PG&E’s success in implementing AI to deliver seamless experiences for its customers, building trust along the way.
- AI in the Utility Industry Webinar1. Jason Perry, Founder of Perry Labs, shares how teams can move from experimentation to real organizational capacity through common use cases and proper governance.
1Requires Insight Center Membership | 2Requires Customer Experience Leadership Council Membership
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Heather Siebken is a product and marketing leader and customer experience expert with more than 25 years of experience driving innovation, customer engagement, and strategic growth. She currently leads councils and marketing at Chartwell, where she designs industry forums and content that help utilities establish a customer experience strategy to navigate customer expectations and digital transformation.
Previously, Heather led product development and marketing at Omaha Public Power District, where she oversaw a broad portfolio of customer energy solutions spanning energy efficiency, demand response, electrification, and customer assistance programs. She is known for her strategic foresight, storytelling, and ability to translate complex trends into actionable business outcomes.
