Yorkshire Water has gone out to tender with a major AMP8 contract to put a framework in place of specialist AI service providers to deliver practical, operationally grounded business-focused solutions worth an estimated £38.4 million (inc VAT).

Yorkshire Water has already made significant investments in its cloud data platform and has established an internal data science team. The organisation is now moving into a new phase of strategic maturity, aiming to apply AI (Artificial Intelligence) in ways that deliver measurable value across the business.

AI is recognised at the executive level as a priority capability to support efficiency, resilience, and improved customer service. Yorkshire Water operates in a heavily regulated environment, and any use of AI must align with regulatory requirements around transparency, ethics, security, and operational reliability.

Although the scope of the framework will be for any AI/ML (Machine Learning) services required, there are currently two priority domains for AI outlined by the water company as follows :

1. Central Control Operations

• Yorkshire Water operates a real-time control room that monitors extensive telemetry across clean and wastewater networks.
• Operators are overwhelmed by alarms, many of which are false positives due to manually-set thresholds (e.g. "trigger at 80% tank level" without data context).
• Decision-making often relies on decades of tacit knowledge, e.g. knowing which alarms to ignore or act on.

There is a strong opportunity to apply AI in:

• Alarm triaging and rationalisation
• Digital twins for simulation and scenario testing
• Predictive maintenance and network optimisation

Performance is heavily regulated; service outages or pollution events result in significant financial penalties - hence the need for trusted, explainable automation.

2. Customer Service Operations

Yorkshire Water serves around 5 million customers, handling thousands of customer queries and calls, often with high manual effort.

Call centre volumes spike due to changes like pricing or hosepipe bans, and many interactions (e.g. moving house) are highly repetitive and ripe for automation.

Digital self-service is limited; the website is dated and lacks tools like live chat.

There is strong interest in deploying voice bots, LLM-powered agents and NLP models to:

• Automate simple tasks
• Improve customer response time
• Prioritise vulnerable customers (while navigating GDPR/sentiment rules)

The focus of the framework is on working with partners who can bring genuine AI expertise and work collaboratively with internal teams to deliver real, operationally grounded solutions.

There is a strong emphasis on collaboration, with suppliers expected to work closely with internal teams and co-develop solutions in an agile, transparent way. The organisation aims to upskill internal staff as part of any delivery, ensuring that solutions can be owned, maintained and adapted inhouse over time.

Suppliers must be able to work entirely within Yorkshire Water's environment, including existing cloud infrastructure (e.g. Azure), CRM (Dynamics), and other systems. No data is permitted to leave the water company's infrastructure.

The framework will seek suppliers with a range of AI-related expertise, including:

• AI consultancy and use case advisory
• Design, integration and implementation of AI tools and systems
• Data science and platform engineering
• Responsible AI and compliance support
• Upskilling and capability-building for internal teams

Suppliers must be able to work within Yorkshire Water's existing infrastructure and data environment, and deliver in a collaborative, agile manner.

Yorkshire Water is looking to establish an open framework via a series of frameworks with substantially the same terms where awarded suppliers are carried over and new suppliers can bid.

Current estimated start and end contract dates are 1 December 2025 to 1 December 2030 with a possible further extension option to 1 December 2033 on a 1 year basis up to a maximum of 3 years.

Deadline for submission of enquiries about the framework is 5:00pm on 27 August 2025 and deadline to submit requests to participate is 5:00pm on 3 September 2025.

For access to the Ariba supplier portal and full information, including the Conditions of Participation and the Invitation to Tender (ITT), interested suppliers are asked to contact Matt Bamforth at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by the specified deadline of 3 September using the following email subject line: CM3224 AI Services Framework

The procurement will be a multiple round process - the Conditions of Participation phase will select the top 10 highest scoring suppliers who will then be invited to participate in at least one further tender round.