A coffee with… Eddie Edwards, director of data and engineering, Centrica

After leaving school, director of data and engineering Eddie Edwards started his career in tech, working on CAD design and customer service systems at Centrica (formerly British Gas PLC). A company ‘lifer’, he’s still with the British multinational energy and services provider 36 years later.

A retro-gaming enthusiast who cites his vintage Donkey Kong flip screen as his favourite piece of tech, Edwards has played a key role in leading Centrica’s data analytics evolution from centralised mainframe systems to a federated lake house concept.

Today, Edwards is a strong advocate for sustainable initiatives at Centrica, recognising the importance of investing in the future. He also champions the journey of technology adoption and guiding employees towards a more tech-savvy future. He spoke with Ricki Lee at Qlik Connect in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month.

How do you take your coffee?

White, with two sugars. Stirred anti-clockwise — not for any reason, just to be different.

What was your journey into tech?

I’ve been working with the same organisation for a long time. In the beginning, it was very much a case of bringing in the technology: large mainframes, having people write on slips of paper to send them off, collating the data, scanning the data, and bringing it all together. Even then, you could see that it was possible to get more value, information, and usage out of that data.

So, I went on that journey, starting with building call centre forecasting and call demand applications, predicting, forecasting, scheduling people and agents, etc.

Now, it’s reached the point where the actual skill level to get into tech is much lower — which could be dangerous because you’ve got people using our models who don’t understand what it’s doing in the back.

You joined Centrica straight out of school, so where did your interest in tech begin?

I’d built applications during school. When I was 14, I used to do a newspaper round for a shop. I built an application that would work out what papers the customers wanted. A paperboy would come in every morning and receive a printout of how many papers they needed: 10 Times, 4 Stars, 2 Suns.

But it all began when I was around 10. I bought a PC, and I was just fascinated. Back then, a lot of time was spent waiting for your games to load, whereas I found it a lot easier just to start coding. It was fascinating to me that you could write a programme and, just by a few lines of code, achieve an outcome. Things haven’t really changed now; understanding the outcome you want and how best to achieve it.

What has been one of the biggest challenges in your career?

 One difficulty has been getting people to accept change and learning how to take them on that journey.

A lot of the conversations we’ve been having more recently are the same conversations we had ten years ago, but people were just not ready for that change. With things like digital twins and speech recognition, I can take a presentation written ten years ago and present it today, and people will go, “That’s exactly what we’re looking for.”

In the last four months, conversations with our C-suite have been about AI. They say, “We need to do AI,” but we’ve been doing it for the last ten years. Really, we’ve been using AI since the 80s, all the way from your first spell-checker. So, one of the key lessons is how to bring people along and not leave them behind.

More broadly, what kind of challenges do you think your industry is facing right now?

We’ve been going through the AI hype cycle, and we’ve arrived at this trough of disillusion. I’m starting to see a number of areas where people are thinking, “Hold on a minute. Is this really going the right way?”

There’s a lot of nervousness around security, how the data will be used, and people’s rights around the data — the GDPR-type challenges that arise. Then, there are hallucinations within that data and some of the broader impacts that could occur.

Also, our organisation works within utilities. Look at how many data centres are being built; data centres need power. For example, in Ireland, something like 23% of power consumption is from data centres, and it’s going to grow to over 40% within the next five years. That level of generation impacts the environment.

When you’re trying to drive the green agenda, as we’re doing at the moment — we’re all about a sustainable future — getting that balance right is really on our mind.

Just weeks away from a General Election in the UK, there’s a lot of talk about net zero and renationalising energy. Do you think that renationalisation is likely?

We’ve created a new net zero part of the organisation focused on heat pumps, solar, batteries, and peer-to-peer trading — community-based power generation and how that’s distributed outwards. We’ve always been big on this.

I don’t think energy will get renationalised. There were a few blips a few years ago with COVID-19, global wars, and energy prices going through the roof, but I’d say the approach taken to manage and support was good.

In my personal view, renationalisation wouldn’t resolve many of those issues. What we demonstrate as an organisation is investing in the right initiatives. We’ve committed to, I think, around £3 billion of investment in more sustainable initiatives and infrastructure. It’s just picking the right opportunities.

Other than caffeine, how do you recharge your batteries?

Walking with my dog. When working from home, you need that transition at the end of the working day. So, I get up and go for a walk to clear my head. I quite like walking down by the river, apart from when my dog dives in it.