Traditional energy brokerages were built around phone calls rather than systems. Even today, we see most contracts across the market ‘processed by hand’, with a person opening a supplier portal, typing in the details, and moving on to the next one. In 2020 there was very little integration between broker systems and supplier systems and we’re now starting to see it.
This explains more about the energy broker market than most people realise. Energy brokers have had an unfair reputation problem for years. A very small minority of brokers have operated on a “see what we can get away with” basis, which has been made worse, and made to look more widespread than it is, by an industry-wide inefficiency that catches good and bad brokers alike. Commission rates across the market are reflective of inefficient processes associated with switching a small business. The process took just as much manual effort as switching a large one. The cost of that inefficiency is ultimately paid by the customer.
The energy market is becoming more complex. Wholesale prices will keep moving, and we still need good energy consultants to make sense of them. AI helps make technology accessible and the energy consultants that embrace the changes in the market and the technological landscape that will rise to the top. With all the changes in the market, associations such as the Energy Consultants Association allows brokers and consultants to keep their finger on the pulse in order to understand these changes as well as give energy brokers a voice to help shape these changes.
Small deals go transactional
A coffee shop uses roughly as much energy as a house, and does not need to be treated like a business with a dedicated buying strategy. What it wants is a fair price with no faff.
AI can do the most immediate good by putting the market’s own transparency directly in front of the customer, rather than filtering it through a person. Data and comparison tools can already show a small business which tariffs it qualifies for, and increasingly flag the fairest deal without a phone call at all. Humans stay in the picture mainly for troubleshooting, for disputes, or for the occasional business that wants someone to sanity-check the decision.
The improvement is not just customer-facing. AI is also changing how quickly brokers can build and improve the technology behind these services. Software development is becoming less about writing every line of code and more about prompting, testing and refining, making it easier to build pricing and comparison tools that can keep pace with a volatile market.
The half-hourly settlement changes rolling out across the industry, with migration underway since October 2025 and full implementation due by May 2027, will sharpen this further. Once every business’s usage is visible in 30-minute intervals, suppliers can build tariffs around genuine usage patterns. A hairdresser open ten to seven looks nothing like a nightclub trading past midnight, and AI is well placed to translate that granular data into a handful of simple, comparable options.
Where AI stops and judgement starts
Complex procurement is different. The more energy a business uses, the more decisions can be shaped by strategy. How to structure a contract, when to lock in a rate, how to manage risk across multiple sites are all considerations. AI can gather and analyse that information faster than any person, but someone still has to be willing to stand behind the recommendation, because complex procurement is a judgement call.
Gartner’s 2026 research into B2B buying backs this up. Even as buyers do more of their research through AI, 69% still turn to a human to validate what they have found before acting on it. Advice has not gone away as a value proposition; it has moved to where the stakes are highest.
What the industry needs to be careful of is AI mirroring the incentives that damaged broker trust in the first place. An AI agent can be trained to push the longest contract with the most commission just as easily as a person can. Ofgem’s early guardrails tend to regulate what is already visible, while the technology itself moves at a pace no single rule can fully keep up with. That is where industry authorities (like the ECA) matter, feeding direct sector insight to regulators so guardrails reflect how brokers and suppliers are actually using AI today.
Getting found matters as much as getting it right
Generative AI and conversational search are now buyers’ most meaningful research too – ahead of vendor websites, product experts, and sales reps combined. 94% of business buyers have used generative AI somewhere in their most recent purchase. Energy buyers are the same. A broker who has built a business on pay-per-click advertising is competing for a channel that is shrinking, while the businesses that show up well in AI-generated answers, through strong reviews, clear case studies, and credible coverage, get considered before a phone call ever happens.
The choice in front of brokers
The market that emerges from this rewards a different mix of skills. The next five years will likely see broker headcounts shift away from high-volume telesales and toward the technical and advisory work that AI cannot do on its own like building the integrations that make small business deals frictionless, and doing the strategic work that complex accounts will always need a person for.
Brokers who treat this as a threat to manage, risk falling behind. Those who treat it as infrastructure to build on, automating the simple end of the business and doubling down on judgement at the complex end, have more opportunity in front of them than the market has offered in years.
Richard Price is a Board Member at the Energy Consultants Association (ECA), focused on Technology and Innovation. He is also Managing Director of Tickd, a fully digital energy switching platform for SMEs.
