Brian McDermott the Chief Information Officer at Calor Ireland on how implemented tech innovations and new approaches to drive sustainable growth

Calor Ireland has been supplying homes, businesses and farms with energy solutions for almost 90 years, and they have implemented tech innovations and new approaches to drive sustainable growth ensuring the business remains competitive in a changing market. To find out more about this I caught up with Brian McDermott, Chief Information Officer at Calor Ireland.

Brian, Calor has implemented tech innovations and new approaches to drive sustainable growth and ensure the business remains competitive in a changing market can you tell me more about this?

I’ve been with Calor for just over 2 years, my role, the CIO role, was a new role in Calor when I joined. So, it was part of the organisation reflecting a need to kind of reflect how important technology was becoming for the business and how we move forward into the future.

We’re almost 90 years old and next year is our 90th anniversary. So, we’ve gone through lots of changes and transitions during that time, but there’s a strong feeling now that we really are going through a big transformation.

Essentially a digital transformation that’s starting to come and hit our industry, where, customer expectations have moved on pretty dramatically. The digital experience expected by customers has changed dramatically and our customer demographics have changed as well.

So, our need to continue to evolve and change our offers on how we support and deal with our customers is more important than ever, and that was part of why my role kind of came into being here in the organisation.

You’ve been around for 90 years, and I’m thinking, for example, in the early days, you’d have used the horse and cart for a while, and then seeing that that then became a truck, a pickup and various other vehicles. And nowadays, that vehicle could now be one that’s electric or uses renewable energy?

Sustainability obviously is very important in our industry. We are dealing with a fossil fuel product, but we do have sustainability in mind all the time. One of our product offerings is BioLPG, which only has 15% of the pollutants of standard LPG, so it’s a much more environmentally friendly solution.

All our trucks that deliver use HVO  which is hydro-treated vegetable oil. So, we do take sustainability very seriously and corporately our parent organisation is the same. We report our sustainability KPIs the same way as we do our financial KPIs and it’s very important  core to how we operate. 

The technology we see being used a lot now is AI and how does Calor implement AI into its systems?

So, one of the things that I noticed when I joined Calor was we have a really strong experimental culture. We recently completed a hackathon where we took a cross-functional group of people out of the organisation. We spent 3 days working with some external partners to kind of hack out some ideas which ultimately we have productionalized and brought into our customer offering now.

But, from an AI point of view, I think the pace of change is really starting to heat up and increase. We started off with some experimental proof of concepts, in the AI space, and then we started to formalise it with making Copilot part of what we do all the time.

But we’re now at a point where we can see there’s numerous players in the AI race, and backing one horse, as in Copilot, is not going to probably be the answer. So, we’re now looking at broadening out our experimentation into a stack of AI solutions. So, we will continue to use Copilot, we’re also going to start using Claude. We’re going to use n8n for automation and kind of orchestration and Lovable for vibe coding and rapidly developing prototypes. So, we’re broadening out our AI journey. It’s probably a little bit different to what people would imagine Calor do from a technology point of view.

One of the beautiful things about Calor is we have, a very long-term brand association and part of the good thing about having conversations like this is it gives us an opportunity to talk about the fact that we’re a modern technology company as well even though that mightn’t be what your perception will be looking at it from the outside.

For me also with AI, the problem you have with Claude is Claude’s a great product, but at the moment in America, they’ve brought a new rule that the latest version of Claude cannot be used abroad. So, in fact, you’ve got multiple choices of AI products you’re using, if one has an issue like Claude does, you’ve got a backup plan, which is good.

Exactly, I think that’s exactly why we’ve got to be very careful not to back one horse in this race, because it’s so emergent that it’s very hard, anybody that has a very defined AI strategy. I’m not sure how they’re doing that because it evolves so quickly that really it’s more a direction of travel and your ability to experiment, learn, move on quickly, pivot. That’s really important for the future, more so than having a predefined strategy of how you’re going to get to the get to your goal because the goalposts are going to continue to shift wildly.

Yeah, you might have a scenario that you got to think because of AI regulation in the EU, if you’re using an AI product that’s American-based, they might not like being over-regulated. So, they might decide, okay, we’re not going to work here anymore, we’re not going to give you the latest features because of that.

Yeah, I think that’s a risk, and that’s why we do need to have a reasonably diversified approach to the tools that we use, and I do think in three years’ time, we’ll look back and I’m sure we’ll be using different tools. I’m pretty confident of that, but our ability and I think our success depends on our ability to get value out of what we use in the moment, and make the right decisions, and pivot quickly when we need to.

How did Calor decide what tech they’re going to use to implement? Because I’m thinking over the years, when you first moved from a horse drawn cart into a truck, and then so forth, and then when you moved. with computers, it would have been one that was the size of a big room, and now they’re so small and portable that technologies changed so much over the years. What do you decide what you’re going to use next?

I think the way I’d answer that is we never start with technology, even though I’m a technologist. I’m one of the less technical people maybe within our team, but we have plenty of technology depth in the team. We really start with what is the problem that we’re trying to solve? What’s the reason? And that comes from two spaces. One is we’re a 360–370-person organisation. It’s a small enough and tight enough organisation that you know everybody and you know what they do.

That’s why when we do bring cross-functional groups together, the real insights into how we need to improve, or where we can improve, is from the people that are operating at the coalface. They have vast ideas of how to transform; it doesn’t come out of a leadership conversation or a senior leadership team meeting. It comes from working directly with the people that are impacted. So, I’m not sure if I’ve really answered your question there.

Yeah, you have in a way because, I mean, that’s because to me, I find that a lot of guys in business now, when they’re looking at new technologies and they all hear the AI buzz. So, they’ve got to implement it into the business, and they go ahead and try and do that. But I’d be asking them, well, everyone’s using AI, so we have to get it in. that’s their excuse. But why?

For me, we really don’t do things without a purpose, and because we’re a relatively small organisation, the purpose needs to be aligned with our strategy. So, we don’t have the luxury of making huge bets that sit outside of the strategy in the hope that something might work out. So generally, when we take something on, whether it’s AI or whether it’s a change, a business change initiative, it’s because it’s moving us towards the realisation of our strategy.

But we do experiment, so, we will take on things that we think will move the dial or move the needle, we will experiment with them, we’ll try out proofs of concept. In a lot of cases, it’ll work out and we’ll see it into production, and it becomes part of our technology estate. In other cases, we don’t and we back away from it, and that there are hard things to do, but we need to get better at doing. I think all organisations need to get better at doing that, experimenting, failing, failing fast, pivoting, moving on. Essentially, you’ve got a 90-year legacy, but we need to be able to operate and act like a start-up would.

Yeah, for me, because you’re a small company, it’s easier to go about doing this and seeing how it works. Whereas if you’re a company with thousands of employees, it’s a lot different, and, as I said earlier about guys who decide the AI buzz, we have to do it, and I guess that’s great. But how it’s going to help you in your business? What, is it going to solve? And you’ve got to look at the competitors, how they’re using AI, and see how it works for them, and if you see what it does for them. How can that work for us? And see what they’re doing wrong. And what they’re doing wrong is what we don’t do.

It is one of those things that AI, I don’t want to call it a bubble, but the movement is evolving and moving quickly. So, I understand the sentiment from somebody who says, well everyone is doing it, so we have to do it, because if you don’t start to experiment, you could be so far behind by the time you start that you will never catch up. That is probably a genuine fear, but for us, how we try and insulate ourselves on that is we only focus the experiments on things that align with our strategy. But we do experiment, and I think that’s important, even from a learning point of view, we’ve done some good things as an organisation.

So, all the senior leadership in Calor and also all the other business units that are part of the SHV Energy Group have all been through the Digital and Transformation Academy in the IESE Institute in Barcelona. That’s a good high-end, leadership leveller for setting the playing field for digital and transformation. Which is great, it’s great for me to know that the rest of our team here has been through that and they understand. They’ve seen all the use cases, they understand where the technology is potentially leading us, and why it’s important that we are really focused on, and transforming, and maybe less so on building the technical skills, because that’s not the most important thing.  

It’s almost more the soft skills that become critical now as we move forward. Our ability to be curious, to always try and find a different way or a new way of doing something, to be resilient, and then also to be agile, that’s going to be really important for us moving forward.

Yeah, because if you’re agile, you can adapt and change and pivot very quickly without any real issues. You know, okay, we’ll try this, if it doesn’t work, we’ll pivot to another way and we can do that, and we’re not going to lose too much downtime, because downtime can be critical.

I think to do that successfully, you do need the right leadership culture in the business, and I’m actually very comfortable that we do have that here. So, when we experiment and we try something out, as long as we learn from it and don’t do it again, the feeling is great. We’ve now learned one way to not achieve that as opposed to why did that go wrong? What happened? So, we do have the right culture around experimentation and the permission, to fail or the permission to kill something that’s not going to deliver a business value is seen as a positive thing, and not all organisations have that.

Earlier you said about startup mind, your idea, as working, I think, like, a startup mind.that means you’re, quick to be agile and change, and you can move, as soon as it doesn’t work out, you can move on. Which is what you want. Stay fresh, stay hungry, and stay foolish.

Exactly, as a famous previous CEO once said, that comment has aged well. I think it’s more relevant now than it ever was.

Yeah, two comments I can think of in tech world is that and Moore’s Law, but Moore’s Law is certainly not what it once was, but what Steve Jobs said is always going to be relevant, because if you look back through his life story, what he went through, and where he ended up. Before he passed away, he had been to the mill and back, but he survived and came back, and he had this Damascus moment where he suddenly realised what he’d done wrong. He says, I’m going to go back and do things differently.

One of the most powerful sessions that I attended before when you go to these Gartner briefings. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the symposium, but I was at one a few years ago in Barcelona, and there was an MIT lecturer, Andrew McAfee, who spoke at it. He was talking about the pace of change of technology, and bear in mind, this is about six years ago, and he was using the example of the chessboard.

There was a parable of the chessboard. A guy that did a job for the local king asked for one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, but for every other square you would double what was on it. So, it’s one square one grain of rice, two, four, eight, etc. With the idea being that he was a humble person, he wasn’t going to ask for too much, but obviously, with the exponential effect of that.

So, his point in the talk was this is all, based on Moore’s Law. So, if you imagine the first square of the chessboard is in the late 50s, maybe 1958, and then every 18 months you’re applying another instance of Moore’s Law so, you’re moving to the next square. We’re now getting to the point where we’re into the second half of the chessboard. Kind of onto the 33rd square. The impact of that is utterly mind-boggling and it will always be mind-boggling moving forward.

So, in the 33rd square you have as much rice as you have in the previous 32 squares. So, his point was the pace of change of technology is just going to feel like it gets so out of control and that was 6 years ago. Now I look where we are with AI and I’m thinking,he was very much right in that, but it also makes me think if you look further ahead again into the future. That’s why we need a different set of skills, a different way of working, to make sure you can ride the wave, of technology change as we go forward.

Yeah, because if you’re not prepared for that, and if you look at AI, and you don’t decide to implement AI agents, you’re going to be left behind, and you’ve got to think, if I do how do I go about doing it?

We have done a bit of that, so, we do have some AI agents across the business. I think though you do need to bring some traditional thinking back to that, though. So, once you start to deploy agents and they become the norm, across the business, and people are empowered to go and build their own agents. You do need a mechanism to have some level of governance over that. Otherwise, it becomes unmanageable into the future, so, that is something that’s a focus area for us now. We’re trying to drive that the governance almost has to follow the experimentation.

Traditionally, you do all that up front before you release this, whereas now we just need to experiment and then catch up with the governance after, and make sure that we don’t leave it too late to do that.

You’ve got technology changing so fast. Years ago, for example, you could send somebody a legal document it could be sent via Telex or a fax. And then suddenly, that changed to becoming, basically, like a DocuSign, or it could be an email. Then suddenly now it’s done online, so they’ve always adapted. But AI is changing so fast, what’s relevant today isn’t relevant tomorrow.

Exactly, and that is a bit of a mindset shift for us, but also for other organisations, that you need to be willing to throw away some of your previous investments because it makes sense to now pivot and do something different. And that’s not something that comes naturally because you’re used to building something that endures and driving the value out of it.

We’ve done some good, I mentioned the hackathons earlier, and we’ve done some good experimentation with those. One of the ideas that came out of our last hackathon was, we built an augmented reality tank sighting application, but the idea was to take that customer, say you were a new customer coming to Calor, to take that kind of customer onboarding journey and make it digital and transparent for the customer.

So, everything was online form-based, whereas before it was kind of written up in triplicate documents. We brought in a third party to work with us on the augmented reality side where you could visualise the tank in your garden, and you could walk around it and take pictures of it. But it was useful because it meant previously we put the tank over there [and asked the customer] ” is that okay?” Whereas they now have an evidence trail of what was promised what got delivered, and it was just much better.

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