Interview: EDF Energy, UK IT Industry Awards finalist
'AI gives us the opportunity to modernise and simplify the core systems we have'
Jamie Banks of EDF discusses the work, opportunities and challenges the company has undertaken this year – work that has propelled it to the final of the UK IT Industry Awards.
November marks the return of the UK IT Industry Awards.
The UK IT Industry Awards are the largest and most well-known event in the technology industry calendar. Owned and operated by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, and Computing, the awards enjoy a level of professionalism and industry knowledge not seen at other shows.
This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Wednesday 12th November in London.
EDF Energy is a finalist in Corporate Social Responsibility Award category, and we talked to enterprise product manager Jamie Banks to find out more about the company's biggest challenges and achievements over the past year.
Why do you think awards like the UK IT Industry Awards matter?
The UK IT industry Awards give us a public benchmark of what good looks like. It highlights practices we can aspire to, while celebrating wins keeps the team motivated and excited about the work we do.
What would winning this award mean to your company?
Winning would validate that our team has achieved something unprecedented at EDF UK - making sustainable IT a reality by delivering concrete carbon reductions.
What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?
EDF is on a Net Zero mission, and we're proud that we've been able to reinforce that by showing internal platforms can lead the change by reversing the emissions trend in a growing cloud estate - and doing it collaboratively. We reduced AWS emissions year-on-year (431 -> 422 t), whilst still onboarding 21 new services, and we saw 24% of 205 services shrink their footprint.
What have been the biggest challenges of 2025 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?
Three stand out.
- AI sprawl vs value. Tools are multiplying faster than guardrails. We tackle this with an AI governance team (approved tools, use-cases and data rules), a lightweight team that provide expert guidance to the wider organisation.
- Security and resilience pressure. The security risks and attacks keep rising in the UK, we've seen many large organisations targeted. We have an ongoing focus on doing the basics brilliantly and ensuring that we always comply with the certifications we hold such as Cyber Essentials+, along with investing effort in immutable backups and rehearsed recovery. We have made secure defaults the easy path via platform engineering "paved roads" (hardened images and templated pipelines).
- Cost management. Cloud costs and sustainability go hand in hand. We have seen that by focusing on the sustainability of our cloud, we also save money on the bill so teams should think of cost, carbon and performance together and act on the same signals.
How do you think the industry has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?
We've seen a gear change rather than a step change – cloud is now normal, and AI is here and bedding in to most organisations. This means teams and companies have had to move fast.
The challenge is now about maturity and getting the right governance, data hygiene and measurable outcomes in place to ensure we can continue to adopt and capitalise on the technology advancements we're seeing, without losing control.
What do you see as the main opportunities for the industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?
AI gives us the opportunity to modernise and simplify the core systems we have, while building on our focus to continue to improve the sustainability of our estates and embed the engineering best practices in to every team.
The UK IT Industry Awards will take place on 12th November in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.