Through digital transformation, electric utilities can gain new efficiencies, capabilities and opportunities that will enable them to thrive in the 21st century.

• Computer vision can provide a nuanced interpretation of vast amounts of satellite, aerial, drone, and other imagery. This insight, combined with more structured data (weather history and forecasts, among others), can help optimize programs for vegetation management, wildfire safety, maintenance, drilling, mining, and other field activities.

• Anomaly and outlier detection, a fairly basic application of AI, can help utilities proactively detect emerging issues, such as malfunctioning or underperforming assets, billing system errors or security concerns. This can lead to opportunities for streamlining operations and business processes, as well as prevent and fix problems.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) gleans insights from unstructured text sources: customer interactions, social media posts, survey responses and more. This supports sentiment analysis: indications of how people feel about the utility, its service and its offerings.
• Deep learning techniques for time series analytics can improve customer service and operations through better interpretation of smart meter and IoT data. This supports adaptive learning, personalization, and more accurate projections based on this data