Is Your CPMS Strategy Up For Reevaluation?

Most charge point operators chose their CPMS, or chose to build one, under very different circumstances than they operate in today. The market was smaller, the requirements were simpler, and “good enough” was actually good enough.

But the EV charging industry has undergone a fundamental shift. The networks you’re managing today bear almost no resemblance to the ones you designed your software strategy around. And while you’ve been busy scaling, the definition of what a CPMS should do has changed beneath you.

Here’s the provocation worth sitting with: the biggest risk to your charging business isn’t your competitors. It’s the assumptions baked into your current software strategy that you haven’t questioned in years.

The ground has shifted under your feet

The CPMS decision you made four to six years ago was made for a different industry. 

You already know the familiar pressures. Investors are prioritizing sustainable, resilient business models over pure growth metrics. Operational complexity has intensified across markets and energy management systems. At the same time, customer expectations have become more sophisticated. None of this is news to you.

But AI is fundamentally rewriting the rules of what a charging management platform can and should do.

On the operations side, AI is redefining what “good” looks like. Organizations are shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive optimization – catching hardware faults before they cause extended downtime, identifying patterns across thousands of chargers, and standardizing troubleshooting quality. AI turns problems that once required deep investigation into ones that are now diagnosed in seconds. Essentially, it enables the same-sized teams to manage exponentially larger networks. This is much more than an incremental improvement. It’s a structural change in what operational efficiency means.

On the development side, AI-native engineering is transforming how fast platforms can evolve. The CPMS providers who have rebuilt their development processes around AI are compressing multi-day development cycles into hours, cutting bug rates in half, and shipping daily. If your CPMS vendor isn’t building with AI at the core, both in what they deliver to you and in how they build it, you’re not just falling behind on features. You’re falling behind on the rate of falling behind.

The point isn’t that your original CPMS decision was wrong, but that the criteria for evaluating a CPMS have fundamentally changed.

The boiling frog problem: How CPMS limitations become invisible

There’s a reason most CPOs don’t realize their platform has become a constraint until the cost is already high. The degradation is never sudden. It’s gradual, and teams are remarkably good at normalizing dysfunction.

It starts with workarounds. A manual process that compensates for a missing feature stops being seen as a workaround and starts being seen as “how we do things.” The spreadsheet that reconciles data the platform should surface automatically, the routine of checking three dashboards because reporting doesn’t give you what you need in one view — over time, these patches become invisible. They’re just part of the operating rhythm, and nobody questions them anymore.

Then the strategic compromises begin. When your CPMS can’t support a new pricing model, the business doesn’t say “our platform is holding us back.” It says “that pricing model isn’t a priority right now.” When a partner integration would require months of custom development, the partnership gets deprioritized. As a result,

Teams optimize around constraints instead of opportunities and they don’t even realize they’re doing it.

Meanwhile, the comparison point disappears entirely. If you haven’t evaluated the market in two or more years, you have no frame of reference for what’s now possible. You’re benchmarking your platform’s capabilities against your own outdated expectations and not against what the best network operators in the market are actually working with today.

The cumulative effect of all this is what we’d call operational drag.

It’s thousands of small inefficiencies, missed automations, and manual interventions that compound over time. Each one is individually minor. Together, they represent a meaningful drag on your ability to scale, innovate, and compete.

When was the last time your team asked, “Is this the best we can do?” rather than “How do we make this work?”

It’s not just your vendor, it’s your software approach

When CPOs do decide to reevaluate, most default to a narrow question: Should we switch vendors? That’s a reasonable starting point, but it’s not the most important question. The more fundamental issue is whether your entire CPMS approach, meaning the underlying architecture of how your technology strategy works, still fits where your business is headed.

If you built in-house, the questions are pointed. 

• Are your development and maintenance costs scaling linearly with your network — or worse? 
• Is your engineering team spending more time on compliance updates and protocol maintenance than on features that actually differentiate you in the market? 
• Can your platform support the operational complexity of thousands of stations and hundreds of thousands of users, or are you still running on architecture and tactics that were designed for a few hundred? 
• And critically, can your team integrate the AI capabilities that are rapidly becoming table stakes?

If you bought off-the-shelf, the questions are different but equally uncomfortable. 

• Has your vendor’s pace of innovation kept up with your ambitions? 
• Are you constrained by their roadmap and their priorities rather than your own? 
• Can you meaningfully differentiate your customer experience, or does every CPO on that same platform end up looking essentially the same to drivers? 
• When you need something the platform doesn’t support, such as a new business model or a critical integration, is the answer “we’ll add it to the roadmap,” or is it “here’s how you can build it”?

Is the fundamental architecture of your approach still aligned with where your business needs to be in three to five years?

The most successful CPOs we work with aren’t locked into a pure build or a pure buy strategy. They’ve evolved toward a hybrid approach that lets them leverage proven, enterprise-grade infrastructure for core operations — payment processing, protocol compliance, network management — while maintaining the flexibility to build and innovate where it matters most for their competitive position. They get the reliability and speed-to-market of a platform, combined with the differentiation potential of custom development, without carrying the full burden of either approach alone.

Five honest questions to pressure-test your CPMS strategy

Here are five questions designed to move this from an abstract concern to a concrete assessment.

“Where are we unable to gain a competitive edge, and is our platform the reason?”

Run this thought experiment: if a competitor using the same platform launched tomorrow, what would you point to as your meaningful differentiator? Your brand, your customer experience, your pricing models, your partner integrations — these should be unique to you. If your platform constrains what you can build in any of these areas, you’re not competing on strategy. You’re competing on location and price. And that’s a race to the bottom that nobody wins.

“What would break if we 5x’d our network tomorrow?”

Which operational processes are held together by manual effort or workarounds? Which partner management tasks would collapse under volume? Which reporting and analytics workflows would become unmanageable? You may have 500 stations running smoothly today, but the operational tactics that work at 500 rarely survive at 5,000. The cracks only become visible when it’s expensive to fix them.

“When did our vendor last make us better without us asking?”

There’s a meaningful difference between a software provider and a strategic technology partner. A provider responds to tickets and ships features on their timeline. A partner proactively brings you ecosystem intelligence, anticipates regulatory shifts, and builds capabilities that open doors you didn’t know existed. If you can’t remember the last time your vendor surprised you with something genuinely valuable, such as a capability you didn’t request that made your business better, you may have outgrown the relationship.

“Could we execute our biggest strategic opportunity within 12 months on our current platform?”

Think about the move you’ve been considering, such as entering a new market, acquiring a competitor’s network, launching fleet services, or consolidating operations post-M&A. Now ask honestly: would your current CPMS make that move easier or harder? If the answer is “we’d need to replatform first” or “we’d need six months of custom development before we could even start,” your software isn’t just a tool. It’s a constraint on your strategic ambition.

“Is our platform getting smarter — or just getting updates?”

This is the new question most evaluation frameworks miss entirely. There’s a widening gap between platforms that are integrating AI into their core operations, in analytics, in development velocity, and platforms that are simply maintaining feature parity with last year’s expectations. A platform that’s getting smarter, faster, and more efficient compounds its value over time.

The cost of not asking these questions

The EV charging market will consolidate significantly in the coming years. The CPOs who emerge as market leaders will be those whose software foundation enables them to scale efficiently, differentiate meaningfully, and adapt quickly when the market shifts under them.

Reevaluating your CPMS strategy is about recognizing that the industry has evolved and your technology strategy should evolve with it. The real risk is in assuming your current approach doesn’t need questioning.