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April 3, 2025 — After years of consolidation and caution, the B2B energy retail market in the U.S. and Europe is roaring back to life. Retailers are chasing new customer segments, launching flexible contract structures, and aggressively pursuing volume. But beneath this growth narrative, a quiet crisis is unfolding: ambition has outstripped infrastructure, and margins are hemorrhaging without anyone noticing until it’s too late.
A growing number of retailers are pricing deals, winning them, and then handing them over to operations with almost no visibility into what actually happens to profitability. The systems and commercial intelligence needed to sustain growth are falling short. A recent survey conducted by energy retail software provider Stronn in early 2025 — speaking with over 120 retail leaders across the U.S. and Europe — found that 67% of retailers cannot track margin at the contract level in real time. That blind spot is costing the industry an estimated $2–3 billion annually in hidden losses, according to a parallel analysis by consulting firm Oliver Wyman (released March 2025).
The appetite for growth is unmistakable. In the past 12 months, major U.S. regional retailers like Direct Energy Business and Constellation have re-entered commercial segments they had abandoned post-2022. European players are following suit: Eneco in the Netherlands and EDF in France have launched new time-of-use and corporate PPA products. But the margin environment has drastically changed. With gas and power volatility still elevated — Henry Hub has swung by 30% quarter-on-quarter in early 2025 — and customer demands shifting toward complex renewable-linked contracts, the pricing challenge is exponentially harder than it was in the stable 2015–2019 period.
Retailers that are growing fast without equally fast margin visibility are effectively playing roulette. One mid-sized U.S. retailer, which asked to remain anonymous, told Stronn that it lost over $4 million in 2024 on contracts that looked profitable at signing but turned loss-making after consumption patterns shifted and non-commodity costs changed. “We only discovered the hole when the CFO ran the quarterly P&L,” the head of pricing said.
The core issue is structural. The pricing team uses one set of assumptions; the billing system runs on a different logic; forecasting lives in yet another spreadsheet. When a contract is won, it is “thrown over the fence” to operations, and no one checks whether the actual commodity cost, consumption, and non-commodity fees align with the pricing model. By the time a monthly finance report reveals a deviation, the contract has been underwater for weeks.
The 2025 survey confirmed that customer-level margin visibility — the ability to see, live, what a specific contract is returning vs. what was forecasted — is the top priority for 78% of respondents. Yet only 12% have achieved it. Even fewer (8%) have the ability to automatically flag which contracts need attention and what action to take.
“Having the data is necessary, but it is not sufficient,” notes Sarah Lindstrom, former director of energy analytics at BP and now an independent consultant. “Retailers need a layer of intelligence that surfaces the right action for the right person — whether that’s a data error to fix, a consumption pattern that warrants a product switch, or a renewal signal that the sales team should call the customer now. That is where real commercial value lies.”
AI is often discussed in energy retail in sweeping terms — usually as a magic bullet. But in B2B, relationships and judgment still matter enormously. A senior account manager’s ability to explain a complex non-commodity cost adjustment to a CFO cannot be automated.
What AI can do is compress the learning curve for junior analysts and dramatically accelerate analysis that was previously impractical. In a recent pilot by a large U.S. independent retailer, a three-week portfolio margin analysis that typically required a senior analyst was completed in under 30 minutes using a generative AI model trained on their historical contract data. The same retailer used the tool to identify 23 contracts that were at high risk of becoming loss-making within the next two quarters — 18 of which turned out to be correct when manually reviewed.
“AI is not going to replace the ten-year veteran’s judgment,” says Dr. Kevin Tran, a research director at Gartner covering energy retail technology. “But it can let that veteran focus on the highest-value customer conversations, while the junior team runs AI-driven diagnostics that used to take weeks. That’s a genuine competitive edge.”
None of this works if the underlying data is messy. The prerequisite is a single, reliable source of truth that connects pricing, forecasting, hedging, billing, and sales — functions that today run on different systems and different logic in most retailers. Without that foundation, AI models will amplify errors, not solve them.
The retailers that are pulling ahead are those that invested early in data infrastructure. For instance, one midsize U.S. retailer (which also chose to remain unnamed) can now push price changes eight times a day in response to real-time market movements, instead of once a week. It can roll out a new product structure — including pricing, billing, and forecasting — without a multi-year IT project. That is the direction the entire market must move.
The tension at the heart of B2B energy retail is simple: growth is back, but the tools to manage it sustainably are not. Those that close the gap — through unified data, real-time margin visibility, and AI-powered decision support — will not only protect margins but also capture market share from slower peers. Those that don’t will bleed out quietly.
As one pricing manager in Texas put it: “You don’t know what you don’t see. But in 2025, there’s no excuse for not seeing it anymore.”
