Octopus Energy CEO urges radical agility in age of uncertainty

At the AWS Summit London 2026, Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy Group, delivered a pointed challenge to how enterprises plan and build technology in an era of accelerating change and rising uncertainty.

Speaking on the main stage, Jackson contrasted traditional, rigid enterprise software procurement with the volatile reality businesses now face. He argued that multi year, checklist driven platforms are fundamentally misaligned with a world where market, regulatory, and geopolitical conditions can shift in months, not decades.

“When you’re identifying your needs, you’re almost certainly wrong,” Jackson said, noting that many organisations still design multi year technology roadmaps as if the world will stay stable.

Building for the unknown

Jackson traced the origins of Octopus Energy back around 10 years, when the company made a deliberate bet to build a single, monolithic, Cloud native platform on AWS – long before large language models were on the horizon.

It was a strategic decision, he said, to optimise not for a fixed feature set, but for “relentless innovation”. Rather than predict exact future requirements, the company focused on:

• High throughput, real time data processing
• A unified architecture instead of a “spaghetti stack” of legacy integrations
• The flexibility to exploit emerging AI capabilities as they matured

The result eventually evolved into Kraken, Octopus’s now independent technology platform, used by utilities and energy companies around the world.

Agile Octopus

One of the clearest examples of that innovation first approach, Jackson said, was Agile Octopus, a product that exposes the true, highly variable wholesale price of electricity to consumers.

In the UK, electricity prices can swing from negative values to very high peaks over the course of a day. By passing those real time price signals through to customers, Octopus enabled people to shift their usage to cheaper – and sometimes even negative – price periods.

The behaviour that emerged was not something any traditional specification process would have predicted:

• When prices went negative, some EV owners unplugged their own cars and invited friends round to charge
• The host effectively got paid to supply free driving to others, while the guests enjoyed zero cost charging

“None of this would have appeared in a traditional enterprise software spec,” Jackson noted. “It emerged because the platform allowed us to innovate quickly and then watch what customers actually did.”

From zero energy bills to treating the grid like a giant battery

Jackson argued that this agility has unlocked far more than tariff experimentation.

He highlighted how, with solar panels, a heat pump, and a home battery, Octopus can effectively eliminate energy bills for some households. That has led to partnerships with major house builders, designing entire developments around radically lower or zero bill homes – again, use cases that would have been nearly impossible to predict at the outset.

Electric vehicles, he said, are transforming not just transport but the energy system itself:

• A typical EV battery can power a home for around five days
• Octopus can choose when to charge that battery from the grid – preferably when prices are lowest or negative
• With vehicle to grid (V2G) and smart control, cars can discharge back to the grid or the home when prices are high

That dynamic turns millions of cars into a distributed energy resource of unprecedented scale. Jackson said Kraken now effectively controls around 3GW of EV capacity – equivalent to a large nuclear power station – even though EVs still only represent a small fraction of the market.

“As EVs become dominant, they will completely change our energy system,” he said, calling this shift only possible because of “the huge amount of data we’re processing through AWS.”

10 trillion rows of data and global scale

To illustrate the scale, Jackson cited striking data volumes:

10 trillion rows of data ingested in a year – roughly 300,000 rows per second. He suggested this is around 10 times more than Visa handles in global payments volume.

430 forecasts of the UK energy system are generated every day – around 18 billion scenarios per year.

This data is used to:

• Forecast grid demand and prices
• Understand EV charging behaviour across 3 million public charging points worldwide
• Plan where new charging infrastructure is most urgently needed

Crucially, Jackson said, Kraken’s architecture on AWS allows global reuse of learnings. What the platform learns in Munich can be applied in Manchester the next day, with the same codebase running across multiple countries.

Navigating sovereign data and critical infrastructure

Jackson acknowledged increasing concerns from governments about data sovereignty, especially for critical infrastructure sectors like energy. Here, AWS’s global footprint of data centres and collaboration with Octopus has been key.

By ensuring that data residency and regulatory requirements can be met in each country – while still running on a common platform – Octopus can retain one global software core yet comply with local rules.

That design, he argued, turns regulation from a constraint into an implementation detail, rather than a blocker to innovation.

The human outcome

Beyond technology and scale, Jackson stressed that the ultimate impact is human:

• Early adopters benefit from radically cheaper or even free EV charging
• Households see more predictable or eliminated energy bills
• Vulnerable customers – such as an elderly person dealing with a bereavement – can still receive careful, personalised service, because the platform handles complexity in the background

He claimed that this model doesn’t just feel good; it delivers hard metrics any CFO or investor would value, positioning Octopus “head and shoulders above everyone else” on key performance indicators.

In a heavily regulated sector, he suggested Octopus may be one of the few European players to overtake long established incumbents, largely because it built for agility from day one.

The core message: agility is the only sustainable strategy

Jackson closed with a clear warning against long range, rigid planning in an age of AI and climate disruption.

“In a world where we don’t even know what will be happening next year,” he said, plans for 2030 or 2050 that assume stability are increasingly detached from reality.

Instead, he urged organisations to treat every innovation as a launch pad for the next: “What matters is being able to bring these technologies to bear for our customers at scale with phenomenal agility. Everything we learn is simply the launch pad for the next innovation.”