By Jennifer Rivero
Salesforce’s Energy & Utilities (E&U) Cloud has come a long way since it was first announced in late 2020. The Vlocity acquisition earlier in the same year provided the foundation for E&U Cloud data model. At Dreamforce 2025, it was great to see the investments and innovations that are going into building out the E&U platform. What once felt like an emerging foundation feels like it is accelerating into a robust ecosystem.
The New Reality: Extreme Weather as a Constant
In May 2024, Houston learned a new word: Derecho. It’s a straight-line wind event that caused the area’s most severe damage (not from a hurricane) in 25 years. More than a million customers lost power and 24 hours later, over 555,000 were still in the dark. The neighborhood chatter was ruthless, and it highlighted the messy, complex reality of modern grid management:
- A homeowner became the local villain when they refused to allow access to their backyard for necessary repairs.
- The Cajun Navy showed up to cut down trees where they could, helping yes, but also surprising crews who showed up to work.
- Reports from friends of out-of-town linemen who had traveled in, but were told they were not needed.
- Finally, the question everyone wanted to know – why don’t we just bury the lines?
The truth: burying lines can cost up to $7 million per mile, compared to $350,000 per mile for overhead lines. That kind of cost makes full-scale undergrounding totally unrealistic and an inefficient use of resources.
Modern grid resilience requires a holistic approach: strategic burying of lines (yes, this is still part of the approach!), storm resilient poles to support above ground lines, and of course, vegetation management.
Houston isn’t alone. From record heat waves, wildfires, and winter storms across the U.S., extreme weather is now routine.
AI-Enabled Field Service Takes Center Stage
The highlight of the E&U Cloud Keynote was a fully orchestrated demonstration of AI-powered vegetation management. Utilities can spend an estimated 10–20% of their annual O&M budget on vegetation management, so even small gains produce massive value.
The demo showed an end-to-end, AI and data-driven flow with:
- Agentforce Agent monitoring satellite imagery for vegetation growth and forest health. Agent flags an area for further investigation via drone footage.
- Smart drones with RGB cameras, LiDAR, and thermal imaging, investigating further and sending data back to an Agentforce Agent to assess.
- Agentforce Agent processes the footage to classify tree species and growth characteristics, detect danger trees with high proximity to power lines, and forecast growth patterns for proactive planning.
- Agentforce Agent automatically generates a Field Service work order to dispatch a vegetation management crew with a drone footage, notes, and recommended actions.
This was a data-enabled approach to enhance grid reliability, reduce outages, and improve safety and operational efficiency. Imagine also being able to leverage this technology and workflow for emergency response for faster assessments, safer working conditions, and faster power restoration.
Field Service Voice: The Most Talked About Announcement
One of the biggest reactions of the conference came with the announcement of Field Service Voice. This is not just dictation/transcription, but full voice-to-context AI.
A technician in the field can speak about their work, and Agentforce will interpret its meaning, categorize the work, and automatically prefill data in the work order. It’s the kind of technology that increases adoption, shortens closeout times, and improves data quality.
Note that this is launching for Field Service first, it’s not available for Sales reps or BDRs in Sales Cloud, which I’m sure will be coming soon.
AI: Less Hype, More Reality
Last year’s AI narrative centered on “AI replacing jobs.” This year, the conversation shifted toward Employee Agents, AI designed to augment human roles, not replace them. Dreamforce 2025 felt grounded than Dreamforce 2024. Companies showcased real outcomes, not hype.
And in a major shift, the entire platform has been rebranded under the Agentforce umbrella (e.g., Marketing Cloud → Agentforce Marketing), tying capabilities to persona-driven, action-oriented automation.
Agentforce Actions for Energy: Industry-Specific AI Skills
Utilities face a uniquely challenging environment:
- Rising costs and inflation
- Continued pressure to reduce operating expenses
- Complex tariff structures
- Regulatory guardrails around pricing, heat-related shutoff protections, and usage transparency
Customers buy a commodity, yet expect personalized customer service and experience, creating both service complexity and opportunity. AI is a way to deliver this personalized customer service at scale. Every session featured persona-driven, industry-aware Agentforce Actions.
These are pre-built skills for AI tailored to each persona. Here are Actions available or planned for Energy & Utilities Cloud:
Customer Service Skills — Pilot (Available Now)
- Manage Billing Updates
- Fetch Premises by Billing Account
- Fetch Service Points
- Manage Premises and Service Points
- Get/Submit Meter Reads
- Case Summary
- Stop/Start Service
- Manage Energy Service Agreements
Energy Sales Skills — GA October 2025
- Multi-site quoting (with site upload and grouping)
- Advanced promotions
- Broker management
- Commission calculations
Field Work Skills — Pilot October 2025
Energy Advisor Skills — GA February 2026
Rate & Usage Insights — Future Roadmap
These targeted Agentforce Actions accelerate time-to-value and reduce customization, exactly what utilities need for modernization.
Energy & Utilities Cloud: Growing Fast, Moving Into Core
Energy & Utilities Cloud and the other industry Clouds have been shifting to core since Spring of 2023. This has enabled Salesforce to pull in capabilities aligned to other Clouds, making industry Clouds richer by benefiting from Salesforce’s horizontal investments and innovations.
Here are some highlights of new functionality:
Revenue Cloud Enhancements
- CPQ and standardized pricing
- Quote creation across channels
- Tariff comparison and modeling
- Automated workflows for complex scenarios
Salesforce Contracts
- Document generation
- Contract creation and updates
- Full contract lifecycle management
- Legal terms automation
Unified B2B and B2C Sales on Core
You can see from the roadmap, Salesforce is making new functionality accessible from either core or the Managed Package, so companies are not being forced into a costly migration.
Regrello: Bringing Order to Supply Chain Chaos
One of the most intriguing announcements at Dreamforce was Salesforce’s acquisition of Regrello in August 2025. For an industry where supply chain delays, manual processes, and storm logistics can make or break customer experience, this one could be transformative.
Regrello is an AI-powered supply chain and operations platform built to tackle what most ERPs ignore:
the messy, unstructured, unpredictable processes that actually run a utility’s day-to-day operations.
Think:
- supplier emails
- contracts and PDFs
- outage logistics
- procurement workflows
- vendor coordination during storms
- all the “Excel + email + hope” processes that don’t live in structured Salesforce objects
Regrello turns this unstructured chaos into prescriptive, automated workflows using a no-code AI engine. Not predictive guesses, actual guided execution.
Here’s how it fits into Salesforce’s broader vision:
- Data Cloud becomes the central intelligence layer
- Agentforce powers the decision-making and actions
- Regrello ingests, interprets, and structures the unstructured data
- Slack becomes the command center for collaboration
For Energy & Utilities, the implications are huge: faster storm response, smoother procurement, fewer manual handoffs, and better coordination across suppliers and crews.
Regrello isn’t just another acquisition—it fills one of the biggest operational gaps utilities face. And paired with Agentforce, it’s poised to redefine how work gets done behind the scenes.
Closing Thoughts
Dreamforce 2025 made one thing clear: Salesforce’s investment in Energy & Utilities isn’t slowing down—it’s accelerating. What once felt like industry “features” are becoming industry-grade platforms, deeply integrated with AI, automation, and persona-specific intelligence.
From AI-powered field operations to smarter sales and service, the future of E&U Cloud is more cohesive, more capable, and more directly aligned with real-world utility challenges.
