Edison and Technological Governance in the AI Era: From Documents to Intelligent Management

With over 140 years of history, Edison was founded with the ambition to bring energy everywhere, playing a key role in the country’s development. Today, the Group boasts 7 gigawatts of installed capacity, covers 23% of Italy’s gas imports, and serves more than 3 million electricity and gas customers. With a 6,000-person workforce, Edison is a leader in the energy transition, aiming to generate 40% of its power from renewable sources by 2030.

Antonella Periti, Chief Information Officer
Dario Luigi Vercesi, Head of Architecture

During the Yubiq Insights25 event

The Challenge

In 2019, Edison assessed its document landscape and found a fragmented environment spread across legacy data centers, departmental file servers, and outdated applications. Millions of invoices, contracts, maintenance reports, images, and emails were stored in inconsistent formats, with misaligned metadata and varying retention policies. 
This fragmentation hindered data analysis, hampered compliance with GDPR and ARERA regulations, increased infrastructure costs, and complicated the shift to a cloud-native model, essential to competing in volatile sectors like renewables, grid flexibility, and liquefied natural gas. 
Leadership called for a transformation: converting scattered archives into a unified, AI-accessible source of truth to support decarbonization initiatives and reduce total cost of ownership. 
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The Approach

After a six-month software selection process, Edison chose the Yubiq platform for its API-first architecture, cloud-native scalability on AWS, and full compliance with European regulations. The program followed a process-first methodology. 
A joint Edison-Yubiq team cataloged over 8,000 document types and 35 critical workflows, redesigning processes, assigning document owners, standardizing metadata and retention rules, and establishing connections to the new Enterprise Data Platform. 
In 2020, a SaaS pilot stress-tested the solution with massive ingestion, up to 10,000 PDFs per hour, alongside multilingual OCR and automated classification. 
Once KPIs were met, quarterly rollout waves followed, covering procurement, finance, power generation, and retail. Each wave included historical archive migration, user training, and API optimization, while a FinOps committee monitored monthly marginal costs for storage and computing. 
In 2023, Edison introduced advanced document intelligence: automatic IBAN cross-checking to prevent fraud, generation of commercial dossiers combining financials and open data, and real-time comparison of supplier bids against technical specifications to identify inconsistencies before negotiations. 

The Impact

In under five years, Edison’s document management has evolved from passive archive to strategic asset. The total cost of ownership (capex + opex) was cut in half by decommissioning legacy data centers and implementing disciplined FinOps governance. 
The time-to-market for digital services dropped from 24 months to just 8–12, enabling faster product launches. 
Automated controls on financial flows recovered €1.2 million in fraud and reduced audit times by 70%. Offer review cycles were shortened by 40% thanks to AI-powered comparisons between technical requirements and vendor proposals. 
All critical documents now offer full traceability and 100% compliance with GDPR and ARERA guidelines, earning Edison a “fully compliant” internal audit rating. 
Over 200 professionals have been trained in cloud, data governance, and AI, contributing to more than 20 integrated models combining structured and unstructured data, on a platform that balances industrial robustness with experimental agility. 
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