Thirty Years of Energy Data: Part 1

From electricity consumption data availability and early web dashboards to AI agents and finance-grade energy data, EnerKey’s 30-year journey mirrors the transformation of the energy market itself. Head of Product Management at EG EnerKey, Iiro Kuntsi, reflects on what has changed completely — and what must never change at all.

In 1995, the electricity market in Finland was opening up, the internet was still learning to walk, and energy data was something you mostly kept in binders and spreadsheets. Somewhere in that landscape, EG EnerKey was founded.

Thirty years later, we talk about AI agents, domain-specific automation, CSRD, EU Taxonomy, green loans, and energy data that must stand up in front of auditors, banks, and investors. The technological distance between those two worlds is enormous.

But behind all the change — new tools, new rules, new buzzwords — there are things that cannot be allowed to move. One of them is deceptively simple: if you lose sight of customer needs, the rest does not matter.

That tension between radical change and non-negotiable constants runs through EG EnerKey’s history. Few people embody it more clearly than EnerKey’s Head of Product Management, Iiro Kuntsi. We sat down with him for a quick vacuuming of insights.

From Many Products to One Focus

When Iiro talks about EnerKey’s past, he doesn’t start with AI or cloud-native architectures. He starts with a portfolio of different services: “Back in the day we had different services and products for our customers’ energy-related needs,” he recalls. “EnerKey was the one for energy management.”

Over time, the company made a series of decisions that would shape its future. Other services were gradually carved out and sold. After 2018, EG EnerKey became what it is today: a pure SaaS company focused on energy management.

If the early years were about centralising data — pulling consumption information into one place so customers could finally see what was happening — the next phase would be about something harder: helping them act on it.

A Product Manager Who Has Seen Every Side of the Table

Iiro joined the company in 2017 — not through R&D, but through marketing. “I started as a digital marketing specialist and part of the sales leadership team,” he says. He later became Chief Digital Officer, responsible for branding, marketing, communications, digital sales tools, and eventually product.

He has moved fluidly between marketing, sales, customer onboarding, support, and development — even acting as Product Owner for sustainability and AI features. Today he leads EG EnerKey’s product management function.

For potential customers, that matters. EG EnerKey’s product is being shaped by someone who has sat at every table where the product actually lives.

From Monitoring Data to Automating Decisions

Originally, energy management was about getting data into one platform: monitoring, reporting, and creating consistent views. That foundation remains essential — but expectations have changed entirely.

Today, the question is not whether you have consumption data. It’s what the platform can do with it without adding more manual work.

This led to one of EG EnerKey’s biggest milestones: the development of Ines (Intelligence for Energy Management and Sustainability), originally launched as VSEM — the Virtual Sustainability and Energy Manager.

Instead of manually chasing anomalies or comparing dozens of buildings, Ines identifies where savings and deviations are likely to be found across entire portfolios. Automating this type of analysis is a game changer for large organisations.

And today, the next step is underway: an AI Agentic EMS that builds on existing analytics and Ines results to suggest meaningful actions, not just present numbers.

Building for a future of AI

This is where EnerKey’s story shifts. Automation and AI mark a turning point — but they are only part of a broader evolution shaped by regulation, finance, and rising expectations around trust, data quality and user experience. That is where we continue in Part 2 of "Thirty Years of Energy Data".

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