Jay Bhatty is the CEO and founder of NatGasHub.com.
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Energy costs affect every business in every industry. Whether you're the CEO of an airline, a retailer or an automotive parts manufacturer, energy is a necessity on your balance sheet that you’re paying close attention to.
Research indicates widespread nationwide increases in utility costs from 2019 to 2023, though state-level trends vary greatly. Average retail electricity rates jumped more than 5% from 2025 to 2026, according to data from the Energy Information Agency. There isn’t a single reason for this increase. Multiple factors influence electricity rates, including incidences of natural disasters, fluctuations in natural gas prices and changes in customer loads and renewables portfolio standards.
The current conflict in the Middle East is driving up energy prices for consumers and businesses around the world, affecting the cost of items from consumer goods to transportation fees. I’ve heard speculation that backlash from this price hike will push industries to make urgent investments in renewable energy, but I predict the opposite will happen.
Building out the infrastructure necessary to support renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, is costly, complex and time-consuming. I support reducing carbon emissions as a long-term goal, but it’s not practical as a short-term solution. If we could flip a switch and use renewable energy instead of oil and gas, we would have done so already.
The U.S. has a large, readily available supply of oil and gas and the existing infrastructure to support it. Solar and wind power, on the other hand, require a massive investment to build new infrastructure. You need large swaths of land to install solar panels or windmills, then approvals from local communities to construct transmission lines from energy sources to cities across the country. A project can easily get tied up in eminent domain issues or other regulatory problems for years.
A principle I swear by is this: People will go where the molecules are. Businesses need energy now, not 10 years from now, and it is easier and faster for them to rely more heavily on existing energy sources. They are more likely to switch to another oil and gas supplier than build entirely new infrastructure.
Many of the conversations I hear about energy needs revolve around big tech and the amount of electricity required to power data centers and AI on an industrial scale. These are conversations worth having. But they should also expand to include how businesses of all sizes are affected by rising energy demands.
"Just 8% of small [business] owners reported that their [energy] costs had not increased in the last three years," according to a 2026 National Federation of Independent Business survey, and 80% noted that rising costs had significantly affected their companies.
In a 2025 EY survey of leaders in mid-sized to large businesses in eight global markets, 66% of respondents said they "worry about accessing the reliable energy needed to grow” and 80% "expect their electricity consumption to increase in the next three years.” Leaders ranked sustainability as their third priority for energy needs, behind reliability and affordability, stating that they wanted a balance of “growth and green,” with an emphasis on improving their self-sufficiency. Two-thirds said they plan to invest in on-site power generation and battery storage, and 20% have already made investments.
Business leaders are already feeling the constraints of the energy market in their day-to-day operations, but they don't always translate those pain points into meaningful action. The question I want every CEO to be asking right now is: How can we operate faster and smarter within our current constraints?
You have access to technologies that weren’t available five years ago. I believe the next five years will be critical in separating companies that can create real enterprise value in this environment from those that wait too long to act. I often see people getting stuck in the learning phase with AI. They spin their wheels and confuse being busy with being effective.
It's already too late to build a competitive edge if you're waiting for others to adopt it first. Use speed to your advantage. Get clear on what you can do in the near term to eliminate friction in your workflows. Which manual processes are regularly wasting your team’s time or getting in the way of them doing more interesting or strategic work? If employees had a magic wand to remove one frustration from their job description, what would it be?
My advice is almost always to start with agentic AI. Pick a small pain point that is repetitive, manual and error-prone and that a team member has to do every day. Incorporate AI agents to automate that process, keeping a human in the loop to iterate and make improvements as you go. Once that process is working smoothly with AI, celebrate your quick wins as a team, and look for ways to expand into other workflows.
Look at the big picture when you weigh the pros and cons of buying versus building agentic AI tools. I see a lot of leaders falling into a common trap and only calculating the capital investment of building an in-house solution. They fail to figure in the operating expenses of maintaining the solution year after year. See if you can find a partner that can offer you an agentic AI service that is better, faster and cheaper than you could build internally. Industry-specific expertise is especially important when selecting a software partner. My company builds robotic process automation and agentic AI software specifically for companies in the energy industry. You want to find a partner that understands the software needs of your particular sector, whether that’s law, retail or real estate.
The energy constraints businesses are facing are daunting, but these constraints can also be opportunities. Leaders who intentionally use new technologies to operate with more agility can carve out a competitive advantage instead of getting left behind.
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