Naturgy Deploys a Phone-Based AI Agent for Home Repair Calls, One of 130 AI Use Cases Now in Production

Naturgy says it has deployed 130 AI use cases across its businesses, and the most visible is Dani, a free voice assistant that helps customers and non-customers fix household breakdowns over the phone.

Dani was built with HappyRobot, a voice-agent startup, and has been running since a pilot began in March. It has resolved about a fifth of incoming queries without a technician visit. When a specialist is needed, it can arrange a visit to the home in under three hours. It is also trained to spot critical phrases such as a gas smell and hand the call to a human operator immediately.

Dani sits inside a much wider program. CIO Rafael Blesa, Naturgy's top digital executive for nearly a decade, told a Madrid gathering organized by IT consultancy Tokiota that generative AI solves problems earlier technology could not reach. For a company with close to 20 million customers worldwide, the first target was call center quality: analyzing calls and automating NPS checks.

Guide, don’t prohibit

Blesa's operating principles are worth noting. Teams should be able to test the technology with no restrictions on which business processes it touches, inside clear risk policies and AI guardrails. Human supervision remains important in critical processes, and the aim is to guide rather than prohibit. He wants employees to lose their fear of the technology, and wants the technology function to be seen as a key ally by showing it can cut timelines and costs and raise efficiency.

130 use cases is a scale number, not a pilot number. That is the gap between "we're exploring AI" and "we've operationalized it."

“130 use cases is a scale number, not a pilot number.”