Energy

An energy business holds a lot of paperwork and a lot of regulated physical assets that are costly to get wrong. Its billing records, consumption patterns and site access logs are often personal data under the FADP.

Switzerland has no AI law of its own. The Federal Council chose sector-by-sector rules on 12 February 2025, and the FDPIC confirmed on 8 May 2025 that existing data protection law applies to AI.¹ The EU AI Act matters here because it names energy directly.

• Retrieval over technical documentation and field-service knowledge, where a confidently wrong answer at live equipment is expensive. Our grounded knowledge copilot cites or abstains and recommends resolve or escalate. It is a working prototype.
• Contract and document intelligence over supply agreements, grid-connection contracts and regulatory filings. See the tiered document pipeline, a working prototype with per-tenant budget caps.
• Privacy-preserving pipelines that let sensitive operational or customer data reach a model without the raw values. See anonymise before inference, an internal build.
• Battery and propulsion telemetry. Our electric-boat helm reads both over CAN bus. It was a client delivery and reached a first working prototype.

Retrieval is usually the safest start: it does not touch grid operation, and you can evaluate it against technician questions within weeks. Contract work comes next, because a failure there is a flagged clause, not an outage.

Annex III point 2 of the AI Act lists AI used as a safety component in the supply of water, gas, heating or electricity as high-risk.² The classification applies only where the deploying entity is a “critical entity” under the Critical Entities Resilience Directive. A designated utility faces a stricter bar than a smaller business using the same kind of system.

EU member states make that designation, so a Swiss operator with no EU footprint is likely outside it. Ask counsel to confirm where you stand in week one.

For a designated entity, Annex III obligations apply from 2 December 2027. Annex I, for AI embedded in regulated products such as machinery, follows eight months later on 2 August 2028.³

This page is a screening note, not legal advice. Ask your counsel before you rely on a classification.

• Treating all of energy as critical infrastructure, and over-governing a low-risk document tool.
• Treating a system that touches grid safety functions as a document tool, because nobody asked the critical-entity question.
• Sending billing or consumption data to a general-purpose model without aliasing it first.

Start with the AI opportunity assessment. In one to two weeks it names a metric and an owner, and its regulatory applicability note raises the critical-entity question early. See also AI regulation in Switzerland.

• WorkA grounded knowledge copilot for field service
• WorkA tiered document intelligence pipeline
• WorkAnonymise before inference
• WorkA helm for a fully electric boat