British Gas is replacing call centres with AI
Key Points
- British Gas owner Centrica is cutting around 1,300 roles, including 14% of its customer operations workforce
- Customer contact has fallen 20% in a year and around 90% of customers now self-serve digitally
- Customer satisfaction hit a record high of +37 NPS despite the cuts, with complaints down 0.4ppts
- Centrica invested £92m in its transformation programme in H1 2026 alone
- The company aims to strip £500m from underlying costs by the end of the decade
British Gas owner Centrica is cutting around 1,300 roles, including 14% of its customer operations workforce, as AI and digital self-service dismantle the case for traditional call centres.
The reductions, set out in Centrica’s 2026 interim results, include a proposed cut of around 500 contact-based roles across its customer operations team, further reductions in offshore outsourced support and additional role reductions across group support functions.
Centrica said it has also been shrinking headcount through natural attrition as customer behaviour changes. Group direct headcount fell 2% to 21,529 during the half.
Average contact per customer fell 20% year on year, while around 90% of customers now use digital self-serve channels, up 2 percentage points on last year.
Centrica attributed the decline to targeted deployment of AI tools, work to eliminate the root causes of customer contact and simpler customer journeys across its re-platformed technology stack.
Somewhat counterintuitively, satisfaction has risen as human contact has fallen. UK Home Energy Supply recorded a Net Promoter Score of +37, a record high and 4 points above December 2025, while complaints fell 0.4 percentage points compared with the first half of 2025.
British Gas’s Trustpilot rating improved to an “Excellent” 4.4 stars from 4.3 at the end of last year.
Further cuts
The workforce reductions form part of a technology-led transformation programme that consumed £92 million in the first half of 2026, comprising £75 million within adjusted EBITDA and £17 million in capital investment.
Centrica expects the full programme to cost around £600 million, split between £400 million of operating costs and £200 million of capital investment, and is deliberately booking all of it within business performance rather than exceptional items so that every initiative must justify itself commercially.
The goal is a £500 million underlying cost reduction. Centrica has committed to holding operating costs, excluding bad debt and depreciation, broadly flat in nominal terms from 2025 through to the end of the decade, absorbing inflation and the incremental costs of growth entirely.
Operating costs on that measure already fell 3% in the first half.
Centrica noted that the programme extends beyond customer service and it is re-platforming core technology across Retail and its group support functions, investing in a Single Customer View platform and migrating business customers onto its Ignition system, with 50% of UK SME customers now moved across.
The company also flagged that AI investment strengthens its cyber resilience against increasingly sophisticated threats.
