Thames Water first to put satellite AI leak detection into routine operations

What happened

Thames Water has signed a 13-month contract with Origin Tech that makes it the first water company to fully integrate the firm's Origin Orbit satellite leak-detection system into business-as-usual leakage operations. The contract, launched in March 2026 and announced the following month, follows an 18-week trial in which the technology identified more than 800 leaks across the Thames network.

The trial numbers explain the decision. Of the leaks found, 92 per cent were non-visible — water escaping underground with no surface evidence a customer or inspector could report.

Several individual leaks were losing more than 10 litres per second. Repairs made during the trial saved around 8.7 million litres a day.

Under the full contract, Thames Water is deploying a 20-strong specialist team, with each crew expected to find around 25 leaks per week. The company's stated goal is to cut leakage by more than 100 million litres per day.

The technology

Origin Tech, a start-up founded in 2019 and based in the North East of England, processes satellite data through AI models to identify the signature of water escaping from buried pipes. The output is not a vague district-level alert: the system directs repair crews to a search area of roughly 30 metres, which is what makes it operationally useful. Finding a non-visible leak by conventional acoustic survey means walking the network; a 30-metre box means a crew can be productive from the first hour on site.

The company is not new to the sector. It already works with 12 UK water companies and says its technology prevents the loss of more than three billion litres of water a year across those partners. What is new is the contractual status: elsewhere the technology has been used in trials and campaigns; at Thames Water it is now part of routine leakage operations, with crews resourced against it and a daily savings target attached.

Why it matters for UK & Ireland

Around one-fifth of all water put into supply in the UK is lost through leakage, according to Origin Tech co-founder John Marsden. Most of that loss is invisible, which is precisely the category the satellite approach targets — the trial's 92 per cent non-visible figure suggests the technology is finding leaks that conventional reporting and inspection were missing entirely.

The significance of this contract is less the technology itself than the procurement model. Earth-observation leak detection has been piloted repeatedly across the water sector; the hard question has always been whether trial economics survive contact with business-as-usual operations. Thames Water, the UK's largest water company with the sector's most scrutinised leakage record, has concluded they do, and has committed crews and a 100 million litres per day target to prove it.

Shane Gloster, Thames Water's head of leakage, put the operational case plainly: satellite data gives "a faster and more accurate indication of where the network has issues" than waiting for leaks to surface or be reported. For the other 11 companies already working with Origin Tech, and for utilities in Ireland facing comparable leakage rates, the Thames contract creates a reference case with published targets against which performance can be judged.

What to watch

The numbers are the story from here. The trial delivered 8.7 million litres a day from 800 leaks; the contract target is more than ten times that. Whether 20 specialists finding 25 leaks a week each can sustain that rate across a network the size of Thames Water's, and whether the leaks found in month ten are as large as those found in week one, will determine if this becomes the sector's standard operating model or an outlier.

The contract runs for 13 months, so evidence will arrive quickly. Watch also for whether other companies convert their Origin Tech relationships from campaign work to business-as-usual contracts on the Thames model.