ENGIE Energy Access: Boosting solar access with analytics

About Engie

ENGIE Energy Access is the leading Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGo) solar and mini-grids solutions provider in Africa, with a mission to deliver affordable, reliable and sustainable energy solutions. The company develops innovative, off-grid solar solutions for homes, public services and businesses, enabling customers and distribution partners access to clean, affordable energy.

Industries: Renewable Energy Solutions

Location: Kenya

Products: BigQuery, Google Earth Engine

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About Atlas AI

Atlas AI has built a geospatial artificial intelligence platform that helps every organization anticipate changing societal conditions, where people live, where wealth and poverty are concentrated, how the physical makeup of communities is evolving, and more, to determine where to invest today to achieve their mission in the world of tomorrow.

Atlas AI's platform guided Engie to target optimal regions for expansion, leading to a 48% increase in monthly sales in a pilot program conducted in Kenya.

Google Cloud results

Engie achieved a 48% sales increase in Kenya, validating Atlas AI's recommendations
Atlas AI’s hyperlocal market insights empower Engie to create targeted marketing campaigns and tailor product offerings effectively
Atlas AI's Aperture guided Engie to target optimal regions for expansion, optimizing operational focus
Scaling Atlas AI & Engie's solution holds the potential to unlock a USD 100M+ annual solar appliance business in Africa
Engie's data-driven approach paves the way for off-grid solar connectivity, aligning with SDG7's sustainable energy goals

Atlas AI and Engie are reshaping energy access in Kenya

Using predictive analytics to promote off-grid solar connectivity in Kenya

The global shift toward renewable and sustainable energy sources has never been more critical. As the world collectively strives to address climate change and advance economic development, the off-grid solar home appliance market has emerged as a powerful solution. This market not only promises to electrify millions of lives but is also a key component of Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7), which aims to "ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all" by 2030.

ENGIE Energy Access, a global leader in off-grid clean energy solutions, recognized the enormous potential of this market. They were determined to accelerate the adoption of Engie's solar appliances across the Kenyan market, a region with vast untapped potential. To achieve this ambitious goal and future-proof their supply chains, Engie turned to Atlas AI, a pioneering predictive analytics company known for its expertise in harnessing high-resolution geospatial data and machine learning. Through its proprietary Aperture® platform, Atlas AI provides location-based insights that empower organizations to make informed, data-driven decisions.

The challenge: Accelerating growth through targeted customer acquisition

In late 2022, the ENGIE Energy Access team in Kenya identified customer qualification and acquisition as top priorities for driving the growth of their business. Despite their reputation for product quality and consistent year-over-year sales growth, Engie was still a relatively early entrant into the Kenyan market. To ensure their success, they needed to find effective ways to connect with the highest-potential customers in areas with significant demand potential.

Engie's customer acquisition strategy involved three interconnected attributes: identifying and targeting potential customers in high-density areas of Kenya with inconsistent access to the grid, focusing on those with the financial capacity to repay consistently, and identifying individuals interested in purchasing Engie's off-grid solar home appliances.

The role of Atlas AI's data and platform

Atlas AI's data and platform emerged as the ideal solution for Engie to identify and monitor local communities in Kenya where they could concentrate their growth efforts. Engie posed a series of critical questions that needed answers:

Who were their existing customers in each market?
What products could customers in these markets realistically afford?
Were they reaching their maximum potential in each market?
What was the potential return on investment (ROI) if they expanded into new markets?

The Aperture Platform, powered by Atlas AI, was uniquely positioned to address these questions:

It modeled socio-economic attributes like consumer spending levels and infrastructure access indicators, such as electrification at a village level, for each of the 1450 wards across Kenya.
It predicted which Engie products were best suited for target customers in each market based on an assessment of credit risk.
It evaluated Engie's sales performance in existing markets to identify market-related factors influencing strong sales performance.
It recommended markets similar to existing high-performance areas, predicting expansion priorities and market potential.
It continuously learned from Engie's performance, refining predictions, and adapting to changing market conditions and Engie's evolving market footprint, sales performance, and product mix.

About Atlas AI's Aperture® Demand Intelligence Platform

Aperture is a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) application that operates end-to-end on Google Cloud. It is part of the Google Cloud Industry Data Cloud for Sustainable Supply Chains. Aperture combines Atlas AI's proprietary machine learning data with customer data, offering businesses predictive business insights. The platform, powered by Google Earth Engine and BigQuery, provides customized market segmentation based on each customer's unique operating context. It forecasts key business outcomes at a localized level, including revenue potential and climate vulnerability, guiding operational and investment focus over time.

Aperture offers geospatial visualization and real-time business intelligence (BI) dashboards, and its data and insights can be integrated into existing internal BI and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, such as Looker, SAP, and Tableau, through API integrations.

"Companies such as ENGIE Energy Access are helping us to realize a future powered by clean, sustainable energy for all. However with over 700 million people around the world still without energy access, new tools are needed to forecast where consumer demand will be, and connect complex supply chains to the identified communities. The latest advances in geospatial AI from Atlas AI and powered by Google Cloud unlock this capability for sustainable infrastructure providers."

—Abe Tarapani, CEO, Atlas AI

Methodology: How Aperture® unlocks high-performing markets

Atlas AI leveraged its extensive location data, spending power metrics, grid connectivity data, electrical access indicators, population density data, and Engie's experiential market data to make informed recommendations. Aperture used this wealth of data to identify high-performing markets, helping Engie focus its efforts for maximum impact.

What defines a high-performing ward in Kenya? Aperture answered this question by identifying the top-performing wards by sales. High-performing wards shared specific characteristics:

Cost-Efficient Density: They had a minimum population density that made it cost-efficient for sales teams to visit.
Affordability: Their population spent within the target range per day—enough to afford Engie's products, but not so high that they could likely afford alternative energy sources.
Electrification Gap: A significant percentage of their population lacked access to electricity.

Aperture filtered and displayed wards meeting these criteria, enabling Engie's commercial team to maximize sales potential continually.

Market prediction using machine learning

Engie harnessed Atlas AI's machine learning-powered market performance analytics to answer a crucial question: "How many customers are likely to be in location X for product Y?" The predictive model underlying these insights considered dozens of demographic, infrastructure, and historic performance variables, exclusively available via Aperture.

This predictive model provided Engie with valuable insights:

It evaluated where to continue investing in existing markets.
It identified optimal timing and locations for expanding into new territories.

Through careful analysis of this data, Atlas AI recommended specific locations for Engie to focus its sales and expansion teams.

Field validation: Translating predictions into real-world results

To validate Aperture's performance predictions, Atlas AI and Engie collaborated on a pilot program. Engie's commercial teams in three different regions of Kenya—Western, Eastern, and Coast—participated, with the first two regions serving as control groups. Engie closely monitored sales performance during the pilot program.

In contrast to the Western and Eastern teams, whose sales performance followed historical trends, the Coast region's regional manager fully embraced Aperture's recommendations, targeting specific areas. The result was a remarkable 48% increase in monthly sales.

This field validation exercise demonstrated the effectiveness of Aperture's recommendation model in translating predictions into real-world sales results.

Results: Unlocking growth and future opportunities

The collaboration between Atlas AI's Aperture and ENGIE Energy Access delivered tangible results:

A 48% increase in monthly sales in the Coast region pilot program validated Aperture's recommendations.
Aperture guided Engie to target optimal regions for expansion, optimizing their operational focus and resources.
The scalable nature of Aperture presents the potential to unlock a USD 100 million+ annual solar appliance business in Africa, empowering Engie to bring affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy to millions.

Moreover, Aperture's roadmap includes advanced customer segmentation analytics, supporting the modeling of target customers by product type. This approach can help Engie reduce customer default rates by avoiding overselling, a common challenge across the industry.

In summary, high-resolution market segmentation, facilitated by Atlas AI's Aperture, holds the key to unlocking significant opportunities in Africa's off-grid solar appliance market. By strategically targeting high-density areas with unreliable grid access and identifying potential customers with the financial capacity to repay consistently, ENGIE Energy Access can gain a competitive advantage over established market players. Through hyperlocal market segmentation, Engie can create targeted marketing campaigns and tailor product offerings to the needs and preferences of specific segments, enabling them to secure a competitive market share and achieve ambitious growth goals.

This partnership exemplifies the potential of data-driven decision-making to address critical global challenges, combining innovative technology with sustainable energy solutions to drive meaningful impact. As ENGIE Energy Access and Atlas AI continue to collaborate, the future holds the promise of brighter and more sustainable energy access for communities across Africa and beyond.

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

About Engie

Industries: Renewable Energy Solutions

Location: Kenya

About Atlas AI

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