Alinta Energy spins up AI system for executive insights

Alinta Energy has built a multi-agent system that connects executives to insights, and the underlying source data, to assist their thinking and decision-making.

The gentailer - both electricity generator and retailer - had previously built an AI system to answer questions for call centre staff and other business users.

At Databricks’ Data + AI Summit in the United States, Alinta’s general manager of data and AI Brad Walker outlined the executive-focused AI use case, which the company calls ‘Alinta Intelligent Strategic Engine’ or AISE - pronounced ‘ace’.

Walker said that AISE was born out of a collaboration between Alinta’s CEO and CIO.

“The conversation came to us that they thought we'd invested heavily in our [Databricks] platform over the last six-and-a-half to seven years, so they wanted to see what it could do for the executive team on the AI front,” Walker said.

“We collaborated with Databricks and over a period of four weeks with about 70 person days, we managed to build a multi-agent system that brings together 500 of our structured data metrics and over 9000 documents that the board and the executive team rely on: board papers, strategy decks, market research.

“Our system leverages a supervising agent that decides what is the nature of the question being asked by the executive and then returns the result.”

Every result also comes with a “confidence score” that is intended to guide executives in how much weight they should put into the response.

“It tells them ‘You can make a decision on this’, [or that] ‘this is directional but good for your thinking’, or ‘this is generally correct but don't bet the farm on it just yet’. 

“It also links to the specific document or the specific metric … that the insight is [derived] from.”

AISE is now in production use, with ongoing work to build out AI agents to interact with metrics and documents from each of the company’s business units.

Ry Crozier attended Databricks Data + AI Summit 2026 in San Francisco as a guest of Databricks.