AWS re:Invent 2025 - Southwest Gas: Agentic AI readiness and SAP modernization (HMC205)

Summary of AWS re:Invent 2025 - Southwest Gas: Agentic AI readiness and SAP modernization (HMC205)

Introduction to Southwest Gas

• Southwest Gas is a utility company headquartered in Las Vegas, serving 2.3 million customers across Arizona, California, and Nevada.
• They have won multiple awards for customer satisfaction and digital transformation, including 5 years as the #1 customer satisfaction provider in the West Large Customer and Residential category by J.D. Power.
• Southwest Gas has also won two SAP Innovation Awards for their digital transformation using SAP Rise and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) innovations.

Challenges with Agentic AI Adoption

• Industry research shows that up to 95% of organizations report seeing zero outcomes from their agentic AI projects, and Gartner predicts 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027.
• The key reasons for these failures are:
  • Agentic AI demands a new, engineered-from-the-ground-up operating model.
  • Lack of interconnected workflows between people, systems, and AI agents.
  • Insufficient focus on the "boring work" of building the right infrastructure, governance, and security foundations.

Southwest Gas' Journey to Agentic AI Readiness

• Southwest Gas' on-premises infrastructure was aged and posed challenges in maintaining, scaling, and ensuring security and compliance.
• To address these challenges, Southwest Gas embarked on a cloud-first journey, migrating their mission-critical SAP systems to SAP Rise on AWS.
• This migration was completed in just 4 months, leveraging the strategic partnership between Southwest Gas, IBM, SAP, and AWS.
• Key benefits of the migration include:
  • 35% performance improvement without any additional tuning
  • Ability to complete critical nightly jobs (meter-to-cash) within the same day, freeing up resources
  • Improved capitalization support through integration with accounting and partner systems
  • Shift in focus from "keeping the lights on" to innovation and optimization

Agentic AI Use Cases at Southwest Gas

1. Smart Gas Bill Analyzer:

   • Challenges: Customers frequently ask why their gas bills are high, and it takes agents 10-15 minutes to provide a response.
   • Solution: An agentic AI system that extracts data from various systems (MDMS, billing, S/4HANA, customer support) to analyze the root causes and provide intelligent, insightful summaries to customer agents.
   • Benefits: Faster response times, improved customer trust, reduced call volumes, and better dispute resolution.

2. Regulatory Rate Case Submission:

   • Challenge: Utility rate case submissions to Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) require extensive data and documentation.
   • Solution: An agentic AI system that connects to various SAP and other systems to automatically gather and organize all the necessary information for rate case submissions.
   • Benefits: Streamlined and more efficient rate case preparation and submission process.

Key Takeaways

• Southwest Gas is a highly innovative utility company that is embracing cloud, SAP modernization, and agentic AI to drive digital transformation.
• Successful agentic AI adoption requires a focus on building the right foundational elements, such as interconnected workflows, secure and scalable infrastructure, and enterprise application integration.
• Southwest Gas' partnership with IBM, SAP, and AWS has been crucial in accelerating their cloud migration and agentic AI readiness.
• The company's agentic AI use cases, such as the Smart Gas Bill Analyzer and Regulatory Rate Case Submission, demonstrate the real-world business impact of these technologies.