Interview with Sebastian Weber, CIO of E.ON

WEBER The energy transition is fundamentally changing the way energy companies operate. Now, instead of a small number of easily manageable power plants, thousands of new connection requests for photovoltaic, wind, and storage systems must be processed. These decentralized systems feed into the grid depending on the weather - a sunny or windy day can significantly change grid utilization within a short period of time. A powerful digital foundation is essential for managing this complexity reliably. It ensures efficiency, security, and scalability. That is why we have moved our IT to the cloud and improved system monitoring. Since 2021, we have been able to increase our system stability by 77 percent and respond more quickly to peak loads. In addition, automation has enabled us to save around one million working hours.

In 2026, our focus will be on stability and security, but above all on people. It is important that our employees are able to work with reliable, user-friendly IT systems and that business and IT work even more closely. This is the only way we can bring together the requirements of the energy industry and digital expertise. In addition, we are expanding our data and AI capabilities and making targeted use of the cloud for greater automation – as a basis for efficient work and a functioning energy transition in everyday life. Furthermore, our digital strategy is clearly defined, measurable, and anchored throughout the Group. The crucial point, however, is that digitalization is not the task of individual people and organizational units. Rather, the strategy and its implementation aim to create sustainable added value for our customers by using technology. This can only succeed if the core of the company is digitalized and not just individual areas.

WEBER Digitalization always follows the business strategy, and it must deliver added value to the customer. This can be either directly, through immediate improvements in service, or indirectly, by enabling new services in the first place. This guiding principle has always defined the prioritization of all activities, including those related to digitalization. When digitalization is viewed as an integral part of the business strategy, existing governance structures for prioritization and implementation come into play. Once again, employees play a central role in ensuring success. Through the gradual introduction of a product-centric way of working based on BizDevOps principles, the focus is on the skills needed to implement solutions rather than on traditional organizational structures.

WEBER The most crucial point: without the use of digital technologies, energy transition would be impossible. This once again emphasizes how important it is for E.ON to view digitalization as an integral part of everything it does. Digitalization makes our customers' everyday lives easier, more transparent, and more flexible. Digital services provide a clear overview of energy consumption and lay the foundation for new flexibility offerings and innovative tariffs. Already today, over 30 percent of our customers are primarily served via mobile-first interactions, enabling fast, location-independent, and intuitive access to services.

Another example is the first commercial vehicle-to-grid offering for private customers in Germany, which E.ON implemented in collaboration with the BMW Group. Bidirectional charging enables electric vehicles to become active participants in the energy market, providing financial benefits while stabilizing the energy system. Smart solutions such as the E.ON Home Energy Manager and E.ON Home Comfort automatically optimize energy flows. Customers benefit financially without any additional effort and become active contributors to more efficient and sustainable energy use.

WEBER For E.ON, digital sovereignty—understood as the ability to remain capable of acting and making informed choices—is a guiding principle behind our technology decisions, and one whose importance is growing considering geopolitical uncertainties. Against this backdrop, we have joined forces with CIOs from leading industrial companies to establish the Digital Sovereignty Forum, with the aim of pooling cross-sector experience and developing specific options for action in Europe.

We focus on transparency, risk assessment, and targeted diversification. This includes multi-cloud and hybrid strategies, interoperable architectures, the use of open source, and the conscious development and use of trustworthy European providers. We also continuously monitor the geopolitical situation in the hyperscaler environment. It is crucial that data can be accessed independently in our systems and remains available and controllable within our own ecosystem – regardless of which cloud services are used.

WEBER Our global training platform offers interactive training courses for our 78,000 employees and specifically promotes skills in the areas of data & AI, automation, and productivity. In addition, we tailor offerings to specific target groups – such as DevOps and cloud training for technical teams or AI training and leadership skills for managers – to strengthen the right qualifications where they add the most value in day-to-day business. Currently, our internal GenAI platform is used by 35,000 employees to make their daily work faster and easier.

WEBER Over the past ten years, there have been huge developments in all areas of information technology. Looking back, it's clear that the first chatbots, as we know them from websites or apps, didn't always meet the needs of all customers. At the time, they seemed magical. But when you look at the new generation of these chatbots, driven by AI and especially generative AI, the customer experience is on a whole new level, making the first attempts at digitalizing customer dialogues look insignificant.

The positive effects are much easier to identify—after all, who can imagine modern work without video conferencing directly from a PC or mobile phone? But E.ON-specific projects also made a lasting impression on us: Together with envelio—a scale-up in our ecosystem—we introduced the digital twin in the E.ON distribution network to manage network expansion planning, for example. This happened at a time when many companies were still rightly skeptical about the topic. Because although the theory is convincing at first glance, the requirements in terms of technical expertise and underlying data quality are enormous.