AUSTIN, Texas, June 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Oracle has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Utility Customer Experience Management Solutions 2026 Vendor Assessment.¹ Read the excerpt here. The recognition comes as utilities face rising costs, growing complexity, and higher expectations, making connected customer operations increasingly critical to improving service, reducing cost, and guiding customers to the right actions.

The Oracle Utilities Customer Platform brings together customer operations and billing, metering, service, sales, engagement, program management, analytics, and AI to help utilities move beyond fragmented customer systems and serve customers through one connected operating model. The platform is designed to help utilities reduce the cost and complexity of modernization while improving service outcomes across digital, agent-assisted, and proactive customer journeys.

"Oracle's position in the Leaders Category in the 2026 IDC MarketScape is attributed to how it uniquely integrates behavioral science-driven engagement from its Opower energy management guidance with core utility operations and customer program management. This provides a powerful platform for enhancing the customer experience, including interfaces with demand flexibility and electrification programs," said Gaia Gallotti, research director, IDC Energy Insights. "Oracle's system guides interactions with contextual real-time AI insights across a wide range of needs, from assessing low-to-moderate income assistance eligibility to managing billing for distributed energy resources."

AI for connected utility customer operations

The Customer Platform's integrated approach helps utilities reduce modernization complexity, automate work across teams, and deliver more consistent experiences across digital, agent-assisted, and proactive customer journeys. Supporting multi-commodity utilities (e.g., electric, gas, and water), energy suppliers, and retailers, the platform scales across organizations with millions of customers and high-volume digital communications and contact-center demands. The Customer Platform helps over 275 utilities serve hundreds of millions of people across 45 countries and four continents.

The IDC MarketScape adds, "AI capabilities are embedded via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and positioned as foundational to the Customer Platform, with emphasis on contextual real-time insights for agents (e.g., live recommendations, call and chat summarization, sentiment analysis, and payment propensity prediction), AI-assisted collections optimization, and agentic orchestration across service and digital journeys."

The Customer Platform also helps utilities engage customers before they contact the call center. With Opower capabilities built in, utilities can deliver proactive, personalized communications that help customers understand high bills, identify payment assistance or rate options, enroll in relevant programs, and take action to save money or shift demand. For example, Oracle Utilities Data Intelligence provides pre-built insights and intelligence for every component of the customer platform and an AI assistant that empowers users to leverage natural language for faster access to insights and better decisions. Call center agents can quickly deliver the right information to help utilities address today's most pressing challenges, including long wait times, inconsistent customer experiences, and tedious, inaccurate data capture.

With Oracle's platform, utilities are empowered to benefit from new, built-in listening and transcription tools that aid in customer interactions to allow call center agents to focus on the conversation versus worrying about documentation. This includes foreseeing potential issues such as reasons for a high bill and identifying opportunities such as program eligibility or new rate plans. By lowering total average handle time, the new AI features also are expected to help support utilities' average speed of answer (ASA) to help meet requirements.

Improving customer satisfaction

Moving forward, Oracle plans to equip customer service representatives with AI-generated customer snapshots before calls start, helping speed resolution and further improve the customer connection. In addition, Oracle will add full call transcripts to automatically generate comprehensive summaries for agents, reducing manual processes and improving call note accuracy. This can enable call center leaders to analyze trends and review call information for agent training and quality assurance.

Regarding one of Oracle's key strengths, the IDC MarketScape noted, "Ongoing investments in AI and GenAI embedded across the stack position utilities to advance agent augmentation, intelligent automation, and more data-driven customer operations at scale." We believe Oracle is building on its new, customer experience-focused AI capabilities with even more innovations designed to help streamline utility work, reduce utility operating costs, and elevate utility customer service.

"Utilities are under increasing pressure to deliver faster, more personalized service while managing rising operational complexity and customer expectations," said Mark Webster, senior vice president of Oracle Infrastructure Industries. "Oracle embeds AI directly into the utility customer experience to help service teams resolve issues more efficiently, anticipate customer needs, reduce call center burden, and provide more proactive, empathetic support across interactions. By combining AI with unified operational and customer data, Oracle is helping utilities improve service outcomes while building stronger customer trust and satisfaction."

To view the IDC MarketScape excerpt, click here.

In addition to this evaluation, Oracle was also named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Utility Meter Data Management Systems 2025 Vendor Assessment,² and the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Customer Information System & Billing Solutions for Utilities 2024 Vendor Assessment.³

To learn more about Oracle Utilities solutions visit here and join the discussion on LinkedIn.

About IDC MarketScape

IDC MarketScape vendor assessment model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of technology and service suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor's position within a given market. IDC MarketScape provides a clear framework in which the product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and current and future market success factors of IT and telecommunications vendors can be meaningfully compared. The framework also provides technology buyers with a 360-degree assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and prospective vendors.

¹ "IDC MarketScape AI-Enabled Utility Customer Experience Management Solutions 2026 Vendor Assessment," (Doc # US53663226), April 2026

² "IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Utility Meter Data Management Systems 2025 Vendor Assessment," (Doc # US52984625), October 2025.

³"IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Customer Information System & Billing Solutions for Utilities 2024 Vendor Assessment," (Doc # US49060523), March 2024.

About Oracle

Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.

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SOURCE Oracle