Utility Week

22 | 5TH - 11TH JULY 2019 | UTILITY WEEK Operations & Assets Roundtable 'AI and the data driven utility', Charlotte Street, London, 23 May A rtificial intelligence, or AI, now fea- tures strongly in any utility industry conversation about the technologies that will underpin future business and oper- ating models. It is said to offer opportunities to transform customer service and opera- tions by unlocking data insights that human endeavour might never discover – or at any rate might take aeons in the attempt. That is a tantalising prospect for utilities companies under the cosh – due to market forces and regulatory pressure – to realise ever greater efficiencies and to innovate for enhanced customer value. Attendees at a recent roundtable discussion in London, hosted by Utility Week in association with Cambridge Technology, were keen to grasp this potential and engaged in a lively debate and exchange of experience, which gener- ated a range of key lessons about the actions it is necessary to take in order to get the most out of AI. Here, we present a few of them. Govern your data To be able to reliably generate insight and actions from AI applications, significant groundwork needs to be done to organise available data and put a data governance structure in place. Some of the organisations represented at the roundtable were signifi- cantly further ahead with this process than others. The more advanced among the group had already invested years of work in creat- ing structures to ensure the right people in their organisations had access to the right information for AI experimentation – and that this information is held within an appro- priate architecture that supports visibility and co-ordination of developing AI use cases. Commonly, this work has included cre- ating platforms that are "decoupled" or "loosely coupled" to the core business to allow for experimentation with algorithms. Some companies have also begun building "data lakes" (as opposed to traditional data warehouses), which can pool a wide variety of structured and unstructured data from How to harness AI Utilities keen to become data-driven enterprises need to put in the hard work up front. Jane Gray reports from a roundtable discussion on the foundations necessary for exploiting artificial intelligence. AI for a better smart meter rollout A wide range of use cases for AI were discussed over the course of this roundtable discussion. The most prominent included supporting the smart meter rollout, leakage detection and identifying vulnerable customers. With regards to supporting effective smart meter deployment, one participant described an interesting use case for AI in identifying problematic installation sites – the idea being to avoid sending engineers to any site where it appears uncertain that an installation can be completed. This would reduce the company's exposure to the significant costs associated with failed installations and minimise wasted customer time, thereby also driving better cus- tomer satisfaction with the smart meter rollout. The AI program in development will use photographs of customer meter locations in order to identify barriers to a successful smart meter install – such as partial or complete obscuring of the meter, a lack of space for new meter installation and potentially other prob- lems like the presence of asbestos. Customers booking an appointment for a smart meter installation would be asked to provide a photograph of the current meter (which could be taken on a smartphone ). This photograph would be automatically processed by the AI program, which would raise the alarm about any problems and the customer would be informed if there was a need to postpone or cancel the installation appointment.

• Cover