Watt’s next?

Purpose of project
Impact of project
Project partners

Chief Investigator

Purpose of project

Households and small businesses face multiple complex decisions as they navigate the energy transition, from choosing electricity plans to considering solar, batteries or electrification. This complexity can lead to high transaction costs, low trust and suboptimal investments. While AI tools are increasingly accessible, without full context they can produce recommendations that are misleading or poorly timed.

This project is developing a context-aware decision-readiness AI engine that integrates consented smart meter data, tariffs, property attributes, behavioural signals and policy incentives to identify when a household or SME is genuinely “decision-ready”, and to deliver clear, personalised recommendations, connecting users to relevant products and services such as electricians, appliance retailers and installers, EV providers, and finance options.

The engine is being designed as an independent, reusable pipeline. Its core API uses an AI orchestration layer that can update context, prompts, tools and model settings without rebuilding the system. Intended as ongoing research infrastructure rather than a one-off tool, the project will deliver a proof-of-concept prototype (Technology Readiness Level 3) evaluated for recommendation quality, consumer trust and behavioural outcomes.

Impact of project

The project will test whether improving the timing, relevance and trustworthiness of energy recommendations can assist consumers to make decisions and ultimately increase uptake of cost-effective actions such as tariff switching, load shifting and electrification technologies.

If successfully scaled, the research could establish a vendor-agnostic platform for coordinated energy solutions, helping households and SMEs move from reactive, one-off decisions towards staged, data-informed energy and electrification pathways. This has the potential to accelerate electrification, improve load flexibility, reduce energy costs and emissions, and support greater participation in Australia’s evolving energy system.