An AI–driven migration to cut costs and accelerate the future of energy

As New Zealand’s largest distributor of electricity and gas, Vector Limited (Vector) delivers energy to more than 624,000 customers across the Auckland region. Vector is helping shape a smarter energy future—where data and digital tools empower better decisions for people and the planet. 

Like many companies navigating the escalating costs of VMware licenses, Vector was under pressure to migrate its workloads to AWS before its renewal date. The company’s skilled infrastructure team is highly proficient in both VMware and AWS, but the complexity and time-sensitive nature of the migration created risk. Vector’s general manager of digital technology, Jerry Li, was exploring options when Slalom approached him with a new possibility.

AWS Transform—an innovative service developed specifically to accelerate migration with specialized AI agents—had just been announced at AWS re:Invent. As a leading AWS partner, Slalom had the opportunity to use and ultimately help shape AWS Transform while it was still in its public-preview stage. 

We proposed the solution to Vector with full transparency. "No one knows if it’s going to work," says Maria Sokolova, a director in Slalom’s cloud practice, recalling the initial conversation with Li. "There will be bugs. There will be features missing. It’s 100% a test case, but we’ll be working with AWS very closely."

Li and his experienced team saw the potential of agentic AI to automate many manual tasks and migrate quickly, without sacrificing quality or control. Together, Slalom and Vector embarked on one of the world’s first migrations using AWS Transform for VMware workloads. 

Most migrations follow a predictable path of phased discovery, detailed planning workshops, and environment readiness steps. Vector’s AI-powered migration was different: a race against time with unknowns at every turn. But both teams came to the table ready for anything—and took the leap together. 

"We decided to do everything end-to-end in five weeks," says Sokolova. "We knew this would be the type of engagement where things change very rapidly, and Vector was prepared to keep pace with us. They brought everyone to the table to make it happen."

Slalom and Vector worked side by side throughout the project and had frequent calls with AWS to ask questions, discuss what worked well, find solutions when something didn’t, and suggest new features. With this dedicated migration team in place, Vector was able to navigate the intricate transition efficiently. 

AWS Transform proved to be the optimal solution. In just five weeks—34% quicker than traditional methods—Vector’s pilot migration was complete. The company is now prepared to avoid the costly VMware renewal and reduce operational costs by using AWS-native services. 

"No one can predict the future," says Li. "To remain competitive, a business needs to be able to react to the demands of the market and its customers. Agility is number one."

With this migration, Slalom helped Vector stay agile and manage costs, without compromising quality. Together with AWS, we proved that agentic AI can tackle rapid migrations and reduce manual effort, freeing organisations to focus more time and talent on creating what’s next.