Introducing Watts Chat: instant answers from your utility data

Energy and utility managers don’t have a data volume problem, they have an access problem.

Years of utility bills, meter reads, vendor accounts, emissions reports, rate analysis, and building context sit inside of spreadsheets. The challenge has always been getting the data audited, validated, and ready to find the right answer fast enough to matter: before the leadership meeting, the budget deadline, or the billing dispute window closes.

EnergyCAP® has been solving the challenge of capturing that data, ensuring its accuracy, and validating it for decision-making for four decades. As of today, with the launch of Watts chat, we are also making it easier to get those answers fast enough to matter. With the first generative AI capability built on the Watts AI engine, Watts chat, you can ask a question in plain language and get an immediate, accurate answer from your own validated utility data. No spreadsheets, no searching.

What Watts chat does

Watts chat gives energy, sustainability, facilities, and finance teams natural-language access to the utility data they already manage in EnergyCAP. Type a question the way you’d ask a colleague. Get back a clear, export-ready answer grounded in your own financial-grade data.

Examples of the kind of questions Watts chat handles today:

• Energy management: “What buildings have the biggest year-over-year increase in energy cost?”
• Facilities: “Which meters look like they have abnormal demand spikes?”
• Finance: “Which accounts have the largest month-over-month cost increase?”
• Bill processing: “Which bills are missing for this month?”
• Sustainability: “How have our Scope 2 emissions changed compared with last year?”
• Data integrity: “Check for billing gaps and overlaps.”
• Business management: “What are the biggest risks or anomalies in my energy program right now?”

Answers come back in moments as summaries, tables, and export-ready charts and graphs laden with context, recommendations, and suggested follow-up questions.

Why Watts Cchat is different from generic AI tools

General-purpose AI tools are built for broad questions, untrained on energy and facility-specific use cases, and leave your sensitive data vulnerable to public access. Watts chat is totally secure. Only you and your organization have access to the insights inside Watts chat, and EnergyCAP never shares your data with third parties or external models.

The difference matters. Generic AI tools lack the context that makes utility data useful: the specific account structure, building information, meter setup, vendor relationships, rate schedules, weather, and billing history that produce meaningful answers. Ask a general AI tool about your Q3 electricity costs and it lacks the context to answer accurately. Ask Watts chat the same question and it pulls from all the validated data your organization has built into EnergyCAP, and our own four decades of expertise.

• Your data stays secure: Watts chat works within your EnergyCAP environment. Your utility data is never used to train public models.
• Answers are grounded in validated data: EnergyCAP has always provided financial-grade data integrity. Watts chat builds on that foundation — so the answers your team acts on are trustworthy.
• Context is built in: Watts AI understands the structure and logic of your EnergyCAP data, not just the raw numbers. That’s what makes answers fast and accurate at the same time.
• Proven with real utility teams: Watts chat was shaped through extended development, a six-month beta, and direct customer feedback. Early users report saving dozens of hours per month with Watts chat and gave it top marks for comparing usage and cost across sites, meters, and time periods, as well as quickly answering questions from leadership and other teams. Watts gets smarter the more you talk to it — and we use customer feedback to make improvements every single day.

Who Watts chat is built for

Watts chat delivers value across the energy and facilities team, regardless of experience level.

• For experienced energy managers: Less time spent pulling reports and answering internal data requests. More time doing the analytical work that drives savings.
• For newer energy managers: Get to the right answer without navigating multiple modules or building complex reports from scratch.
• For finance and sustainability teams: Fast, audit-ready data exports for leadership requests, carbon reporting, and budget reviews.
• For large portfolios: Troubleshoot usage anomalies across hundreds of buildings in seconds instead of hours.

Michele M., Energy Management Analyst at Miami-Dade County, described what the beta experience delivered:

Available now, at no additional cost

Watts chat is available today to all EnergyCAP customers as part of their existing software license at no additional cost.

Watts chat was developed over a year, including a six-month beta program validated across multiple industries. The results reflect the daily reality of utility teamwork: faster usage and cost comparisons across a portfolio, surfacing details instantly, and quickly answering questions from leadership and other departments.

And this is just the beginning. Watts chat is the first capability in the Watts AI™ engine. EnergyCAP will share additional product enhancements later this year at the 20th annual customer conference, Catalyst Converge (September 14–16, 2026).