2024 may very well be recorded as a significant year in the history of artificial intelligence (AI). While ChatGPT, a watershed AI technology, officially celebrated its first birthday near the end of 2023, AI systems have seemingly entered the mainstream this year.

To understand how consumers feel about this emerging technology and gauge their expectations for potential applications from their electricity providers, the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC) recently conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,530 respondents, who are all Americans aged 18 or older.

The “Computing Consumer Interest in AI” survey explored consumers’ familiarity with common AI systems (like ChatGPT and Midjourney), their views on the accuracy of AI, their interest in five different AI services from their electricity providers, their concerns around data privacy when using AI systems related to their energy usage and more.

In this month’s blog, we share three key findings on AI from the new survey:

1. Consumers are interested in a range of AI services from electricity providers.

Across the board, consumers have reasonably high interest in all five of the AI services tested in the new survey, with “proactive notifications about power outages and upcoming maintenance” topping the list at 69 percent. However, personalized recommendations – both for reducing electricity consumption at home and for lowering carbon footprints – also saw considerable interest. Fifty-seven and fifty percent of consumers, respectively, were either somewhat or very interested in these AI services from their electricity providers. Somewhat surprisingly, chatbots and virtual assistants for customer service inquiries received the lowest interest, yet 42 percent were still interested in these services.

2. Familiarity with AI systems has a significant impact on this interest.

When we looked at consumers’ familiarity with common AI systems (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Midjourney, etc.), we saw that this had a significant impact on interest in potential AI services from electricity providers. For example, with proactive notifications about power outages and upcoming maintenance, 80 percent of consumers with experience with AI are interested, compared to just 55 percent of those who are not familiar. In addition, with “automatic home optimization of my electricity use by controlling smart devices”, the difference is 30 percentage points – 61 percent compared to just 31 percent – and with virtual assistants/chatbots, it is 31 percentage points (55 vs. 24 percent, respectively).

3. Consumers want to manually accept/reject recommendations from an AI system.

Finally, the survey asked respondents how they want to interact with an AI system that sends them recommendations, and consumers generally want recommendations sent to them for manual approval or rejection (59 percent preferred this). This is particularly true for those consumers who lack experience with AI – 64 percent want this method of interaction. However, about a quarter of consumers want an AI system to initially send recommendations but then learn this as a new skill and automatically act this way for similar events. A minority (15 percent) wants AI to automatically act without additional approval, though this is more popular with consumers who have experience with AI (18 percent vs. eight percent, respectively).

It seems like AI is on its way to becoming an essential part of society and a commonplace way that consumers interact with their electricity providers. However, consumers have their concerns with data privacy and accuracy and their preferences on how they interact with AI systems. By listening to what consumers want around AI, providers can ensure that new AI services become a valuable tool for creating empowered energy consumers – and not a potentially frustrating technology experience.

To learn more about consumers’ familiarity with AI and their interest around ways electricity providers could potentially use AI, view our latest infographic here.