PhilippinesUtilities (power distribution)Launch · $50K
Meralco

Eight million Metro Manila accounts, one storm away from a contact surge — agentic billing and outage service for the capital's utility

Meralco's contact volume is a function of billing cycles and weather; agentic conversations answer bill questions with account-grounded math and turn outage chaos into proactive, area-specific updates.

Entry use case
Outage reporting & restoration updates
Expected outcome
Suppressed storm-surge inbound and fewer repeat calls per outage event
Recommended next step
Pilot framing with customer-retail leadership: proactive outage-update automation for one distribution area ahead of peak typhoon season.
What we understand

Meralco's operating reality

Meralco is the Philippines' largest electric distribution utility, serving Metro Manila and surrounding provinces with on the order of eight million customer accounts.

Public fact

Typhoons and grid events produce outage-driven contact surges every storm season across its franchise area.

Public fact

Rate adjustments regularly make bills a public topic; billing-inquiry spikes follow generation-charge changes.

Public fact

Outage callers mostly want the same two answers — is my area affected, and when is restoration — which agents cannot personally know either.

Reasoned inference

Payment-arrangement and reconnection conversations carry hardship sensitivity requiring careful, policy-bounded handling under ERC consumer rules.

Reasoned inference

Validate with the account team before outreach: Outage-management system integration readiness and area-mapping granularity · Regulated-procurement path and pilot approval timeline · Current storm-event contact volumes and hotline capacity

Build vs buy

Why we have a right to win here

Buy-led target

Limited internal ability or appetite to build the core platform — strong candidate for the packaged solution

Evidence: A regulated utility procures technology through formal vendor processes and has no internal AI platform organization; it will buy a proven, contained solution with regulatory-grade logging and contractual accountability.

Why they won't build the full stack: Utility engineering centers on grid, metering, and outage systems; conversational AI is a procurement category, and ERC-facing accountability favors contractual vendor commitments over internal experiments.

What management is signalling

Rate-adjustment cycles reliably spike billing inquiries and complaint volumes across the franchise area.

Hypothesispublic rate filings and consumer coverage (validate) · 2025–2026

GTM implication: Time the pilot to land before the next rate adjustment or typhoon peak, when the before/after contact-volume contrast is starkest.

What already exists (don't pitch this)
  • Meralco Mobile app and online portal
  • Hotlines and social-media care
  • Outage-management systems
What customers still can't do end-to-end (pitch this)
  • →Proactive area-specific restoration updates at storm scale
  • →Account-grounded bill explanations
  • →Policy-bounded payment arrangements completed in-conversation
  • →Elastic capacity for storm-surge inbound
Opportunity map

Where agentic communications pays off first

WorkflowWhy it matters hereValueComplexitySpeedChannels
Outage reporting & restoration updates
In-channel outage confirmation and proactive area-specific restoration updates that suppress repeat calls.
Storm surges multiply inbound exactly when field crews and lines are most strained.
Friction today: Customers call repeatedly for restoration estimates; hotlines saturate; social media fills the vacuum.
Viber/WhatsAppSMSVoice
Bill explanation & payment arrangements
Account-grounded bill explanations and policy-bounded installment arrangements completed in-conversation.
Rate-change months spike inquiries; hardship handling is regulatorily sensitive.
Friction today: Bill questions need account-level math agents assemble manually; arrangements require branch visits.
VoiceViber/WhatsApp
Service applications & move-ins
Guided application intake with document checklists and proactive status through energization.
Metro Manila's housing churn generates constant connection, disconnection, and transfer requests.
Friction today: Document-heavy applications stall; status calls follow.
Viber/WhatsAppWeb
Watch the change

Outage reporting & restoration updates: today vs the agentic model

Scenario: A typhoon knocks out a Quezon City feeder; every affected account gets a Viber update with the restoration estimate, and the hotline's storm-night load stays manageable.
Today
same interaction, two worlds
Agentic layer
Languages served
2–3 staffed
10+ in one deployment
Platform capability
Cost per contact
$13.50 median assisted
$1.84 median self-service
Benchmark
QA coverage
1–2% sampled
100% scored
Platform capability
Sources & assumptions
  • · Languages served: Platform capability: Gemini + Chirp speech
  • · Cost per contact: Gartner customer service cost benchmarks, 2024
  • · QA coverage: Platform capability: every interaction logged and evaluated
  • · Gartner, customer service cost benchmarks (2024): $13.50 median assisted vs $1.84 self-service per contact
  • · McKinsey, digital-first collections research: 20–25% NPL reduction among leaders; up to 40% opex reduction with gen AI
  • · Baymard Institute: ~70% average cart abandonment (meta-analysis)
  • · IAMAI–Kantar via IBEF (2025): 900M+ Indian internet users; 98% consume Indic-language content
  • · LeadSquared and vendor funnel studies: 78% of students choose the first institution to respond (directional, vendor data)
  • · HDI / ITSM operator benchmarks: $15–25 per L1 ticket; 40–60% of L1 volume is resets/status (validate per customer)
  • · Conventional-flow wait times and volumes are typical operator patterns — assumptions to replace with the customer's own baseline
  • · Agentic-flow behaviors (context retention, 100% logging, in-line policy checks) are platform capabilities, not projections
Recommended solution

One integrated stack, opinionated for this account

Channels · Tilicho Labs
Viber/WhatsAppSMSVoiceWeb

Voice & channel orchestration, telephony, conversational execution, session/state, routing, integration build. Capability coverage validated during implementation.

Intelligence · Google Cloud
Gemini reasoningEnterprise groundingWorkflow agentsMulti-agent orchestrationGoverned actionsEvaluation & analytics
Systems · Meralco
Outage management systemGIS/area mappingBilling systemPayment gatewayCRMService-order workflow

API access to these systems is the critical-path dependency.

Trust & languages
Filipino/TagalogEnglish

Identity-bound sessions, policy-bounded actions, 100% audit logging, human approvals at defined points, in-tenant intelligence.

Business case

The economics, with your numbers

Addressable monthly interactions2.0M
Seller assumption — replace in discovery
Current cost per interaction ($)$0.9
Industry benchmark scale — validate
Automation / assistance rate (%)55%
Seller assumption — pilot proves this
$1.8M
Current operating cost / mo
$7.3M
Modelled gross benefit / yr
0.1 mo
Payback on Launch
156%
3-yr ROI (modelled)
Automated/assisted interactions per month1.1M
Modelled AI run-cost per month (usage + cloud, system estimate)$385K
New monthly operating cost$1.2M

All figures are modelling estimates from the labeled inputs above — nothing here is customer-provided yet. The pilot's first job is replacing these assumptions with Meralco's measured baseline. Package price covers implementation only; recurring usage billed separately.

Recommended package

Launch — $50K implementation

Launch · $50K · A focused, fast production pilot8–10 weeks to a live, measured pilot

Why this package for Meralco: A regulated utility will pilot narrowly first; outage communications is the highest-pain, fastest-proof single workflow to start with.

Included
  • Up to 3 channels
  • One priority workflow
  • Limited enterprise integrations (1–2 systems)
  • API credential & security setup
  • Core conversational + workflow configuration
  • Basic analytics
  • Controlled production pilot with defined success criteria
Not included
  • ✕Usage & consumption (billed separately)
  • ✕Additional workflows
  • ✕Multi-geography rollout
  • ✕Managed operations
Recurring costs (separate from the package)

Packages cover implementation and integration only. Recurring costs are billed separately: Tilicho Labs platform usage (~$0.15/call-min indicative, usage only), Google Cloud consumption, telephony/carrier charges, managed operations, and support & optimization. No package includes unlimited usage.

Customer resources required
  • · API access + credentials for: Outage management system, GIS/area mapping, Billing system
  • · A named business owner for outage reporting & restoration updates
  • · Security review counterpart and policy sign-off (Outage management system scope)
  • · Baseline metrics for the pilot's success thresholds
Executive messages

What to say to whom

CEO

“Public trust in Meralco is rebuilt or spent during every storm and every rate change. Proactive, honest, account-grounded communication at scale is trust infrastructure.”

CIO / CTO

“A Launch pilot needs only outage-management and notification integrations — a contained project with highly visible public benefit.”

COO

“Storm-night hotline saturation is an annual certainty; proactive area updates convert thousands of inbound calls into zero-touch notifications.”

Head of Customer Retail Services

“Bill-explanation quality decides complaint volumes in rate-adjustment months; account-grounded conversational math answers what scripts cannot.”

Chief Risk / Compliance Officer

“ERC consumer-protection obligations are met with consistent, logged communications and policy-bounded arrangements — evidence on every interaction, not a sample.”

CFO / Procurement

“A fixed-price Launch pilot with consumption usage fits regulated procurement, and the storm-season before/after contact data makes the ROI case itself.”

Outreach

Pre-built offer emails for Meralco

Written from this account's own research — the strategic signal, the capability gap, the entry workflow, and the modelled economics — not a mail-merge template. Pick the moment and the persona, edit anything, then copy or open in your mail client.

Moment in the deal
Cold outreach — no prior conversation
Who it's addressed to
Cares about: The workflow itself and its daily failure modes
Register
Length
Draft — edit freely before sending
Open in mail client

Customer-safe by construction: drafts are composed only from customer-facing fields. Account tier, build-vs-buy classification, priority score, internal routing, and partner-commercial detail are not inputs to the composer, so they cannot appear in a draft. Money figures are always framed as modelled from the customer's own volumes. Read before sending — you own what goes out.

The pursuit

Tier 3 — longer-term / partner-led

Why this tier

The distribution utility for Metro Manila and surrounds — around eight million customer accounts with intense billing and outage contact patterns, but regulated-utility procurement makes the motion deliberate.

Recommended next step

Pilot framing with customer-retail leadership: proactive outage-update automation for one distribution area ahead of peak typhoon season.

Entry: Outage reporting & restoration updates · Launch package · 8–10 weeks to a live, measured pilot. Human fallback throughout; success thresholds agreed before build.

Start the pursuit

Research-based priority-account universe assembled from public information, market scale, communication volume, and solution fit. This is NOT an authoritative list of top Google Cloud customers; existing Google Cloud relationships are noted only where publicly reported. Validate every account with the account team before outreach.