INTERVIEW
AI and technology: unlocking the power of innovation in utilities
Carol Johnston, VP, Energy, Utilities & Resources, IFS
1. What challenges do utilities face in managing their asset portfolios and how can technology help in overcoming them?
There’s never been a more interesting, or challenging, time to be a grid operator. Faced with skyrocketing demand for energy…good for the balance sheet, but a monumental task to supply…utilities are having to fast track new projects to increase capacity and shift from a rigid one-way energy model to a more flexible, decentralised model. One able to handle the needs of today while sustaining us into the future.
When looking at which projects to fund, organisations need to consider many factors:
- Rapidly evolving technology – some of this emerging innovation will be obsolete and replaced with something faster, better, cheaper in ever shrinking timelines. The days of planning long, monolithic projects with 30-year ROI projections are long gone. It’s all about reducing the time to value now.
- Increased pressure on capital budgets – while more and more money is being funnelled into energy infrastructure, there are just as many demands on where that money needs to be allocated. From catching up and replacing the trillions of assets that have been stretched well beyond their expected lifecycles, to repairing or replacing assets impacted by extreme weather events, to investing in more pilot projects or trials of emerging technology.
- Workforce and skills shortage – the industry has been shedding talent, whether to retirement, or competition for top talent both inside the industry and against external organisations with much deeper pocketbooks.
- Data centres and EV infrastructure – these high demand locations represent a significant challenge to the utility and require close collaboration and planning with stakeholders, to make sure the extra load can be managed and balanced against regular demand, without bringing the grid to its knees.
But all this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s ensuring alignment with the organisation’s strategic goals, managing de-centralised assets that the utility may or may not own, dealing with intermittent renewal energy generation, and the list goes on!
Organisations are looking to innovation and technology to keep pace and stay ahead in this challenging landscape. From leveraging the ability of AI to empower and improve workforce productivity and asset maintenance strategies. To asset investment planning tools that take the guess work out of which projects to fund and help make the rate case to senior leadership and regulators.
2. What role does data play in underpinning technological change and how can utilities gather the data they need?
Data, or information, underpins everything we are and everything we do. As children, one of the first words we learn is “why” and we use it over and over again to explore the world we live in, shape our opinions and direct our future actions.
Artificial intelligence and technology are no different. It runs on data. What we feed it shapes its foundation and determines its outcomes.
So, it is important to focus on data hygiene as we look at adopting new technology. Is the data we currently have not only accurate, but reflective of the future outcomes we’re looking for? For example, if you fed an HR algorithm data on all your past top management team and it found that 98% of your top 1% were 50-year-old white men, you might think that this is the ideal candidate profile for new hires. Rather than simply a reflection of past hiring practices.
There is no shortage of data available these days, but as we collect it from the vast array of internet of things, field observations, external sources like weather, census, polls, etc consider:
- Is it from a trusted source?
- Does it need to be cleansed, or merged with other data, to paint a more accurate picture?
- Check outcomes and adjust your models as needed.
Like children, AI models learn the more we educate and correct them. Don’t expect perfection the first go around, be patient, monitor, and tweak until you get the results you’re looking for and then let it loose to work for you.
Combining Industrial AI with powerful dashboards and reports, like embedded in IFS Cloud, can transform reams of data into succinct, intelligent business insights. Focusing attention where progress is being made, or problems remain, offering foundational management tools that shouldn’t be overlooked.
3. AI is a particularly exciting and rapidly developing tool for utilities. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for deploying AI?
Well, it runs the gamut from business and grid analysis and planning, to automating and improving customer service, all the way to advancing field maintenance and service activities.
Imagine being able to analyse, predict and respond to asset failures…before they happen. That’s no longer fiction but fact. Or having a system recommend crew compositions and deployments to match forecasted workloads.
The opportunities, it seems, are quite literally endless. At IFS we’re focused on 6 key themes and industrial use cases:
Forecasting & Simulation
- Forecasting event impacts to damage to critical assets
- Forecast and analyse workload by type, location, priority, seasonality, etc. and model required staff levels and training requirements
- Develop inventory & equipment requirements against planned work schedule
Optimisation
- This one has been around for a while now, and was one of the first AI based use cases for utilities to schedule and route optimise work orders…but this technology continues to evolve and now supports dynamic scheduling, considering EV charging stops in route, and much more
- Route planning in support of carbon offset calculations
- Automatic work bunding at the same location
- Restoration activities after a major event, considering critical customers, number of customers impacted, and other criteria
Anomaly Detection
- Real-time asset health monitoring & analysis
- Asset predictive or preventative maintenance
- Vehicle use monitoring
Recommendations
- Having the system make recommendations for actions to be taken based on risk-based issue detection
- Workforce deployment & schedule recommendations
- Crew matrix recommendations
Contextual Knowledge
- Helping users easily and intuitively navigate our software with AI powered contextual user guides
- Similarly, helping users complete quick and accurate data capture and ensuring they work efficiently and safely by following company business processes with smart guides
Content Generation
- Automating capacity plan adjustments needed to meet demand
- Offering personalised training materials
- And finally, for now, automating purchase & work order creation based on certain triggers
And now Agentic AI is poised to take over entire tasks and serve as a digital employee for organisations. Dealing with supply chain, simple accounting, customer service needs, and more.
4. Workforce planning and scheduling is one crucial area where AI can have a significant impact. How can AI-optimised planning and scheduling allow a utility company to get greater efficiency from the workforce?
When we think of technology, AI in particular, we so often jump to how it is going to impact us in a negative way, by taking jobs away from us. But in reality, it is more of a shift, freeing up and redirecting human intelligence to more value-added work. Letting technology take over the more repetitive, data intensive tasks not many of us enjoy doing anyway.
When we look at workforce planning and scheduling, for example, AI is transforming how organisations perform these tasks. Technology can consume and analyse months of future work in seconds, breaking down location, skills, equipment to determine the workforce required to meet the upcoming demand.
This information can then be used to shape hiring and training plans. What work should be contracted? What work can be bundled to avoid duplicate site visits and make more efficient use of available resources? Dynamic schedule and route optimisation can be leveraged to not only generate future schedules, but deal with in-day issues, such as unplanned emergency work, traffic, workers calling in sick, running ahead, or behind, schedule.
Technology advancements are making utilities more proactive and less reactive in their asset and workforce management strategies. Running safer, more reliable grids to serve their communities better.
5. Asset maintenance can be made much more predictive and effective by utilising the right technology. What does this look like and how can utilities get there?
How organisations view and deal with required asset maintenance is being completely re-imagined, not only by emerging technology, but by extreme weather events, shrinking budgets and workforce constraints.
The days of setting and following an asset maintenance schedule is unsustainable and is fast becoming a distant memory. Organisations are looking to leverage technology to be more strategic and take a more holistic view of the full lifecycle and optimise the return on investment of each asset.
IFS has been heavily investing in supporting this shift in direction with a suite of fully integrated, yet composable, solutions that enable organisations to strategically plan their asset investments, create executable project plans, manage a portfolio of active projects with insightful dashboards, schedule work and the workforce, through to ongoing maintenance of assets once they are deployed in the field with scheduled, reactive and predictive capabilities underpinned by AI powered, real-time monitoring of asset performance.
Carol Johnston, VP, Energy, Utilities & Resources, IFS
Carol Johnston is a visionary in enterprise and mobility technologies for the utility industry. For over 20 years she has successfully guided product marketing and product management for energy technology leaders including IFS, Clevest, ABB Software and Itron – identifying and developing emerging technologies to help energy organizations and utilities deliver safe and reliable services in a sustainable manner.
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