• City Power says it launched a new AI-driven chatbot to make its customer support more efficient.
• After using the chatbot, we can confirm that it isn’t really AI-driven at all and instead serves a set of pre-determined answers.
• The CEO of City Power says the launch of the chatbot is part of a new journey in digital transformation, but no new technology is actually involved.

Tell us if this sounds familiar. The electricity in your area just went out and after several hours you decide to report the outage to City Power, but after immediately reaching a machine, you are placed on hold because all its operators are busy – for another hour.

Well, Johannesburg’s power infrastructure company may have heard concerns about this problem because instead of saving some money towards plans to purchase new infrastructure and potentially aid the load reduction problem, it instead purchased a new “AI-powered” chatbot for its recently re-skinned website.

In a statement published to X this morning, City Power says that it has introduced a new Customer Portal on desktop and mobile and “Joulene, an instant customer support AI-driven chatbot.” The chatbot has been launched with the aim of “improving our customer experience and service efficiency.”

We’re not sure about how “AI-driven” the chatbot is, but we can tell you that AI was used to create the logo for Joulene and other images on the new City Power website.

Joulene can be accessed like other chatbots, at the bottom-right of the City Power website, and despite the statement of it being AI-driven and the current wide pervasiveness of generative AI, we’ve seen third-party WhatsApp chatbots with more intelligence.

Instead, Joulene simply gives you a list of options to choose from.

As expected, the options are limited. For example, if one tries to report an outage via the “outages” option, and then selects, “When will my power be restored” one would be sent a canned answer that reads, “We can’t say for sure – every situation is different. But you can get an estimate by seeing the FAQ on type of outages.“

If none of the canned answers are helpful, you can select “None of the above” which then sends the chatbot to find a human agent – and guess what happens then?

Joulene is not an AI-driven chatbot and instead is the same old if-or statement loop mechanism chatbot that we have seen across South African websites for years now. Like the Alfred chatbot that Eskom has used since 2022.

We can confirm this because it serves the same line after each query, with the same typo: “What’s would you like to do next?”

It isn’t even a chatbot in the loosest sense of the word because you can’t actually chat with it and is more akin to a basic information provision software where you click on an item you want to know more about and then it feeds you a canned response.

Now on the other newly launched customer support service by City Power – the new Customer Portal.

City Power says that customers can use the new portal to view up to 36 months worth of historical data related to their power meters, log queries and receive information on a host of smart meter-related points, including feeding source information, outage information related to your account number, meter readings, and billing simulation.

The portal can also be used to apply for jobs in the company, which are automatically short-listed or not based on available vacancies and your qualifications.

“City Power has recognised the importance of digital transformation and we’re taking steps to evolve,” shared company CEO Tshifularo Mashava.

“This includes a cultural transformation that entails not just the adoption of new technologies, but also the incorporation of a digital mindset to engage the evolving needs of our customers,” she adds. Unfortunately for Mashava, we’re not really seeing any “new” technologies here. City Power could have licensed a generative AI to support the chatbot, but they didn’t.

The company’s digital transformation is in name and skin only, without anything really innovative worth noting.