Focused on solutions for the development and application of software for the energy and telecommunications sectors, Wisebyte, part of the Delta Energia group, is eyeing the opening of Brazil’s electricity market.
One of its trump cards is the combination of a digital meter with artificial intelligence techniques to optimize clients’ energy consumption.
In this interview with BNamericas, the technology directors of Wisebyte and Delta Energia, Paulo Reis (pictured, left) and Alfredo Silva (right), explained why AI can contribute to the development of the sector.
BNamericas: How does Wisebyte expect to take advantage of the opportunities in the electricity sector, considering the market opening?
Reis: We’re experts in metering. We developed a product from scratch, from hardware to software, for LUZ, which is the digital energy supplier of the Delta group. Each LUZ customer receives a smart meter and can track their consumption in real time. More than this, we’re able to track for the consumer which items are the biggest offenders on the energy bill, by group of equipment. Then, at the end of the month, they can see which ones consume the most.
So, this whole process is about empowering the consumer, so they can have better energy management and work with insights provided by the platform itself to evaluate what they can do to optimize consumption.
We strongly believe that intelligence will be the differential to add value to other services that Wisebyte will deliver to the energy and telecommunications sectors.
BNamericas: What is the potential for the use of artificial intelligence to contribute to better energy consumption management?
Reis: We’re able, through AI techniques such as big data, to identify consumption patterns, analyzing, for example, current and power, with machine learning, big data, deep learning and neural networks, and to determine which equipment is connected in the customer’s home and analyze their consumption, projection and other information.
Silva: It’s important to recall that this meter we’re talking about is an additional piece of equipment, independent from the distributor’s meter, which is responsible for calculating consumption, and it’s very precise. We have, today, the capacity, with only one meter in the client’s box, to identify the specific consumption of an air conditioner, an air fryer or a refrigerator, for example.
BNamericas: What is the client profile focus?
Silva: Wisebyte is prepared to serve both small and large clients. We’re a company that’s been in the market for 14 years, and we already have some specific products for telecommunications and energy, which can even be customized.
That is why we’re launching the new name, Wisebyte, because we want to show how, with programming, development and intelligence, we can contribute especially to the electric sector, where we understand there’s a lot to be done.
BNamericas: Could you cite other examples of products and services that the company offers?
Reis: Wisebyte’s former name is BestDeal Technologies. It was founded in 2008, when we identified a great opportunity in the telecommunications market, which was the implementation of number portability. Previously, the customer’s number was captive to the [telecom] operator, so if you wanted to change the operator, you also had to change the phone number. So we created the first national number portability system in Brazil, dubbed number portability easy solution or NPE.
From there, other products emerged, such as TCR [telecom call routing], which does call routing [for fixed and mobile networks], analyzing customized routes, cost and revenue etc, as well as network traffic analysis and billing solutions, which is a system that performs operations related to customer consumption billing.
In 2016 we entered the energy market, with the billing solution focused on distributed generation [DG] of energy.
And in 2022, BestDeal was acquired by Delta Energia. Today Wisebyte mainly aims to serve companies that have DG farms, analyzing production, using sensors to analyze solar incidence, temperature, dust, etc.
Silva: We’re going from a market of 130,000 to millions of consumers in the free market. We’ll only be able to make this expansion viable with the use of technology.
Reis: Digital billing has recently started to be used by power distributors. For the revolution of market opening to happen, we’ll have to add services, as happened in the telecommunications sector. As we have this experience, we believe that the same transformations and needs will arise in the energy market. This is why the partnership with the Delta group makes perfect sense.