Making AI work for utilities means treating technology as a partner, not a replacement
Making AI work for utilities means treating technology as a partner, not a replacement
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/making-ai-work-for-utility-companies-a-change-in-power/812619/
Publish Date: 2026-05-12 11:53:00
Source Domain: www.utilitydive.com
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Sean Burri is an infrastructure engineer for Dominion Energy. This article reflects his personal views.
The narrative by now is all too familiar: Deploy artificial intelligence, stabilize the grid and eliminate outages. Executives repeat it. Journalists amplify it. Vendors sell it. And that simplification is terribly wrong.
AI has rapidly evolved from a laboratory innovation to a vital component of decision-making in the modern energy industry. Electric utilities worldwide are turning to AI-driven forecasting, outage response and optimization systems to improve reliability and sustainability.
But the notion that simply deploying AI automatically guarantees better reliability is a misunderstanding that is costing utilities real money and real credibility. Reliable performance depends on how utilities manage data governance, workforce training and infrastructure modernization, not on which algorithm they purchase.
I have spent years in IT operations at Dominion Energy watching this play out in real time. The projects that succeeded were never the ones with the most sophisticated models. They were the ones embedded within enterprise strategy, supported by continuous feedback loops, and evaluated against operational metrics rather than abstract innovation goals — the ones that brought in frontline employees to understand the process on an intimate level. Projects that struggled often treated AI as a plug-and-play solution rather than a transformation requiring organizational commitment.
The evidence is real, but so are the conditions.
The empirical case for AI in energy is genuine. Utilities adopting AI-based forecasting tools have achieved notable accuracy gains…
