Octopus Energy CEO: How agile data could rewire the energy market

The ground is shifting for the energy sector, as decarbonisation strategies and renewables are now a critical focus for companies to scale. Global energy demand grew by 1.3%, or 8 exajoules (EJ), in 2025, according to the IEA, as sustainability conversations are happening, as AI continues to boom – processing huge amounts of data at a speed no one could have predicted.

Greg Jackson, CEO at Octopus Energy, said this level of demand has led to uncertainties across the market, particularly where technology is concerned. Speaking at the AWS Summit London last week, he explained how every company follows the same process when it comes to procuring or making software decisions – cataloguing what they should be purchasing based on what they might want in the future.

“However comprehensive that process, the very beginning of it is fundamentally flawed – because the reality is, when you’re identifying your needs, you’re almost certainly wrong,” he explained.

Delivering agile architecture

When Octopus Energy, a UK energy supplier, started to build a monolithic stack on AWS, the goal was to have the most agile, modern architecture possible. As Jackson explained, the company wanted to leverage an enormous amount of real-time processing – using data as a foundation for intelligence.

“We didn’t know that LLMs would be the solution, but we were ready for a world in which AI enabled the kind of change we’re seeing today,” he explained at the Summit. “It wasn’t a utility company; it was a technology platform.”

Jackson acknowledged the energy sector is in a moment of flux, given ongoing geopolitical challenges – such as the war in the Middle East – and the previous energy crisis that led to unstable pricing and volatile markets.

“I think we’ve all grown up in a world that seems ever more complicated and is changing ever faster,” he said. “The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index shows the world is roughly at [its] peak, five times more uncertain than it was.”

He added: “What that means is that organisations thinking about what they need are essentially building multi-year projects to construct oil tankers that will be impossibly difficult to turn when the world changes. And the world is changing more than ever before.”

It’s this context that means companies often start with a core platform that isn’t fit for purpose, Jackson said, suggesting that it’s often out of date by the time implementation begins, if not before.

“As the world keeps changing, they rapidly stitch more and more onto [their platforms],” he explained. “I always find it soul-destroying when companies announce their plans for 2030 or 2035, or governments announce targets for 2050, in a world where we don’t even know what’s going to happen next year.”

Utilities as technology platforms

Eager to confront the challenge of building for a world no one can predict, Octopus Energy launched its Agile Octopus product with a simple idea: show customers when electricity is cheap and let them shift their consumption accordingly.

“The idea excited people – if we could show [them] when electricity was very cheap, or even negative, they could use it far more cheaply than the standard average price,” he explained during his keynote speech. “Who could have imagined that in a world where utilities are just about keeping the lights on?”

Giving customers visibility over their consumption changed the game for Jackson. Once the infrastructure existed, he explained how Octopus sought to reframe itself as a utility company that works with major house builders to build entire developments that eliminate electricity bills.

“We’re seen as an energy supplier and yet what we discovered was, if a house has enough solar panels, a heat pump and a battery, we can eliminate energy bills,” he said. “None of this would have been in the spec for enterprise software. All of it came from having the ability to be relentlessly agile.”

When it comes to electric vehicles (EVs), Jackson explained how the company can choose to draw power from the grid whenever they want, so they can take it when prices are negative or cheap – and help EV drivers operate at a lower cost.

“With the right setup, we can eliminate charging bills altogether – because we can also export back to the grid, or into the house, at times when electricity is expensive,” he said. “None of these ideas could have been imagined before we set off on the journey.”

He added: You’ll hear about nuclear power stations that take 10 or 20 years and cost billions of pounds [for] three gigawatts (3GW) of nuclear capacity. Today, Octopus controls 3GW of EVs – that’s the scale of decentralised resources.”

Jackson said this achievement has only been possible because of its strong partnership with AWS. It built its industry-leading cloud-based platform, Kraken, entirely on AWS to support a smarter grid by providing customers access to cheaper electricity when renewable energy is abundant.

“Last year we ingested 10 trillion rows of data – 300,000 rows per second,” he explained. “With AWS, we’ll be able to go truly global because these products can be deployed in any market where regulation allows.”

Powering the data behind change

One of the challenges Octopus Energy has found with its expansion efforts is how governments are increasingly worried about sovereign data – particularly when it comes to critical industries like energy.

To tackle these concerns, Jackson explained how the company works with AWS data centres worldwide to ensure every government and utility can meet their security needs, while running on the exact same software stack.

“Partnering to open up new markets where required … results in being able to change an industry,” he said. “As a business, it generates metrics that any CFO, CEO or investors would want to see. [Octopus] has created a business that, in regulated sectors in Europe, may be the only one to have overtaken the formerly nationalised companies.”

While Octopus doesn’t know what the future holds, strong partnerships between energy and technology are what Jackson sees as critical to future growth.

He added: “What matters is being able to bring innovation to bear for our customers, at scale, with phenomenal agility – so that everything we learn becomes simply the launchpad for the next innovation.”

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