Data for People and Processes

title: Data for People and Processes
author: On The Grid
contenttype: podcast
publication: On The Grid
published: 2024-04-24T16:37:00+00:00
sourceurl: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1806988947-zpryme-agency-on-the-grid-mandeep-final.mp3

word_count: 4334

Hello and welcome to ZPrime on The Grid. Today's episode will feature Aaron O'Tan talking with a deep sing of Deloitte about Generative AI and its applications for grid modernization, vegetation management, decarbonization, and a whole host of other applications, as well as general trend discussion as we are wants to do. This was Aaron O'Tan's last episode she recorded before accepting a decision at another company. I want to give, first of all, my heartfelt thanks to Aaron for being a wonderful coworker over many years and for doing a great job hosting this podcast in the last couple years. So, Aaron, you are a legend and we will miss you and now on with the show. So, hello, me and Deep and welcome to On The Grid. How are you doing today? I'm very good. How are you doing? I'm doing great. We were just talking about how it's a Monday morning, so our weeks are just kind of getting started, but doing great. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, what you're working on at Deloitte, maybe something that you're working on currently that is exciting to you? Hi, everyone. This is Mandeep Singh. I'm a managing director at Deloitte Digital. I am based out of San Francisco Bay Area. I lead the field service practice for Deloitte. I'm very passionate about field service and it's impact on our environment and surroundings. Something that I'm excited about, so I'm very excited about impact of AI on field service and this includes recent developments in generative AI. Generative AI or large language models have opened up opportunities to improve productivity of field workers in ways that was not possible previously. If you think about field workers, field workers are often working with dangerous equipment under the elements, such as sun, extreme heat, or cold, and they struggle to capture data on devices that they are given, often they are given too much technology, number of apps they need to travel through while they are wearing gloves, inspecting the dangerous equipment. So what we thought about is how can generative AI improve the field worker experience? And I'm very excited about this field inspection co-pilot app we are piloting that uses large language models to provide field workers a guided experience to conduct inspections in the field. Great, thank you. I'm really glad you shared that personal perspective because I think for the first time a lot of people are kind of feeling that and thinking about the things that you mentioned on the east coast and in Canada and people are really used to hearing about them on the west coast and maybe just not even thinking about how they affect people's day-to-day lives, but it seems like for the first time people are sort of starting to understand that and I think it's important to bring that personal perspective to your work. So thank you for sharing that. Also on the work side that you just mentioned and the you know the new technologies you're working on, what have you been hearing from utilities sort of in in response to you know some of these things that are happening? Strengthening the grid, grid resiliency through various measures such as asset inspections, maintenance, and vegetation management around those assets is top of mind for utilities. This not only improves service delivery, a reliability of service to the customers, but also in extreme cases for territories with wildfire risks, ensures utilities equipment doesn't contribute to wildfires. I'll share a personal story. I live in California. We had a wildfire close to our home in 2021 and just being in proximity of a wildfire with smoke blowing in the direction of your home evacuation orders in place is a very unsettling feeling. So I'm glad that we have been able to help utilities technologies have advanced sufficiently where we can use AI, ML to monitor equipment, detect faults, detect vegetation growing close to the assets to immediate those. If you think about the sources of igniting a wildfire you would need fuel which is vegetation. You need environmental conditions such as dry weather or drought and you need a source of ignition, a spark if you will. So the measures utilities have been taking is essentially removing the source of fuel such as vegetation that grows too close to their equipment, strengthening their equipment through routine asset inspections and maintenance. So inadvertently those assets do not cause wildfires. Broadly speaking utilities are utilizing all options in their toolkits. You think about technology disruptors such as AI, ML and most more recently generated AI. So utilities are using those who are helping utilities use these new technologies to be more productive to do more with less to strengthen the grid and reduce the chances of wildfires. Information and connectivity are improving so a lot of equipment uses IoT devices to send the data on the health of equipment on weather conditions around the equipment in real time. All of this contributes to mitigating the impacts of global warming. Many of those are not in our immediate control such as the dry weather that comes every every year or so. Drought conditions but what we can influence in the short term is maintaining the equipment, maintaining the equipment so it doesn't cause wildfires, maintaining vegetation around equipment that contributes to public safety and reduces the chances of wildfires. Vegetation-related incidents are the single largest cause of service outages in the U.S. for FERC Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. And in extreme cases if that vegetation happens to be in dry and hot climate, such vegetation falling on the equipment or equipment, a lose wire falling on the vegetation could ignite a wildfire. We work with a large utility provider that operates in a region prone to outages due to vegetation-related incidents and not only reduce, not only needed to reduce such incidents but reduce the incidence of chances of igniting a wildfire should that happen. To respond accordingly, the utility provider turned to Deloitte to leverage some of the advanced technology solutions we have to build a scalable solution that helps reduce the impact of vegetation growth with preventative maintenance including identifying and removing at-risk vegetation. If you think about conventional way of monitoring asset health, many of that requires typically on-foot visual inspection, such as sending people out to monitor the equipment, to do asset inspection, to do inspection of vegetation around those assets. To improve upon this process, Deloitte helped the utility implement a remote and automated monitoring system using drones, cameras and alert tools to detect objects closer to high voltage wires. This typically includes a lidar scan of the geography and there are tools that help simulate any vegetation growing too close to the assets, identifying trend points of vegetation that needs to be removed but this needs to be done at a scale without having to send people out to do this inspection visually. So we helped the utility set up a drone program for the purpose. We also implemented a field service work management cloud solution which forms the backbone of this whole solution, orchestrating drone surveillance, orchestrating, identifying trend points and delegating those trend points to contractors managing work allocation, integrated with the geographic information systems with robust maps so that the contractors, three contractor companies can see where the vegetation growth is, those tree crews can be dispatched and they can conduct vegetation remediation activities that typically involves either pruning the tree with branches too close to the assets or in case of dry and decaying trees removing those hazardous trees from the proximity of the assets. That sounds like a really big project and a big undertaking especially because you know these were jobs that were done by humans before and now they're being transitioned to you know everything automated AI machine learning to kind of help these processes along. What were some of the biggest challenges in the actual transition of going from you know a job that was really heavily reliant on physical labor to one that's almost fully automated? In my opinion the biggest challenge is the mindset shift to a digital transformation model. So digital transformation involves using technology to fundamentally change how the business operates deliver values and engages with its customers and employees. In this case we are bringing in new technologies such as aerial inspections, machine learning so that required a mindset shift of the team that is working on these projects to focus on delivering value. This includes taking a customer's centric outcome driven approach where how can we make for example the inspection process more more efficient. It includes embracing agility and flexibility as opposed to traditional waterfall development methodology where we implement a pilot and then analyze the results and then take a data driven approach to decision-making on what features we should implement and how we should roll out those features. And then last but not the least, empowering the workforce. We did a lot of ride-alongs with in spirituality crew that work in the field to see how they operate, what are the challenges they face. We interviewed you know 100 plus such utility crew on their work and what would make their work more efficient. So we brought them along the journey. So improving the workforce understanding how they operate and creating software that really makes them more efficient. In my opinion those are three or four things that if utilities embarking on a digital transformation should be front and center in order to deliver value. That workforce empowerment piece sounds so important because I could see people being you know kind of resistant to change and especially especially when it comes to AI people are really hesitant right now and seem a little bit like unsure of how how it's going to affect them. So yeah I think it's great that you actually took the time to meet with people understand their needs and challenges and like you said bring them along with you. Yeah and I think I should also emphasize that many times people may perceive that AI might you know change the jobs in a way that you know could take away from people but in this case in specifically for utilities there are a number of regulations on how frequently assets need to be inspected and in many cases utilities may not be able to keep up with those commitments to regulators. So the part for AI is to really make the process more efficient and be able to for utility crew to be able to do more inspections and meet those regulatory guidelines. So kind of along that line you know these drones are taking thousands of pictures and collecting thousands of data points like you like you mentioned. So how are utilities managing all of this information both to make sure that the data that they're collecting is you know quality data but that also they're able to extract meaningful insights from the data. Utilities today are typically managing significantly more assets than they were 10 years ago and with prevalence of EVs electric vehicles and need to get energy from carbon neutral sources their footprint the utilities footprint is is definitely going to grow more. So what that does mean taking thousands of pictures collecting thousands of data points and managing that in an effective way. This is typically a four step process. Number one is creation of a 3D network model so that the utilities have a digital twin of their physical infrastructure out in the world. So this digital twin is a geospatial representation of utilities transmission and distribution infrastructure such as poll conductor locations vector models that will form bases of lidar inspections that utilities are doing will form bases of dispatching drone and helicopter operator so that they can take pictures and those pictures can associated can be effectively associated with the assets with ride geospatial coordinates and also increasingly utilities are turning to satellite imagery for the for monitoring growth of vegetation around these assets. Step number two is a data lake to consolidate all this data and make the data available to downstream systems. This includes your asset inventory your vegetation inventory for vegetation growing too close to the assets lidar data satellite data source imagery thousands of images that these drone vendors are collecting associated with the assets and also environmental data that you know informs historical weather patterns on so that utilities can plan better. Step number three is being able to deploy AI ML models. The models are only as good as the data available to them. So once the data lake has been set up appropriately the models can be trained on multiple use cases that includes computer vision models to to go through images identify faults. We also do synthetic image generation to help train these models on what a good conductor looks like versus a bad conductor. Other use cases include vegetation trim forecast on you know how vegetation could grow based on weather patterns rainfall type of vegetation etc so a lot can be done with that AI ML layer to go through these thousands in some case hundreds of thousands of pictures over over significantly large geographic area and then last last but not the least is the field work management aspect once we have run those AI ML models then the work prescriptions need to be captured where the work can be orchestrated with the field crew that will go and need to execute this work out in the field so they can effectively one perform the work and second also form the human eyes and ears of the utility companies to capture the data in the field in many times these field crew when they show up to over location they can update the vegetation inventory for example or they can update the asset condition or asset location so a combination of AI ML techniques together with humans that are that these field users that are going out and doing these inspections conducting these mitigations performing asset repair etc that forms the back that forms the loop back to the data lake so that the data can be continuously improved and that in terms improve the predictive models that in turn improves the machine learning models and lastly I would say we are also augmenting the human worker in the field with a generative AI so the generative AI can also assist humans in the field to be more productive to be able to use these images to extract data automatically and also help humans in a conversational way to be more effective not only in collecting data but extracting meaningful insights from the data. So going back to some of the things you touched on at the beginning when you talked about you know your family and climate change and how does this how does this all fit into you know decarbonization and utilities meeting their their climate goals and decarbonization goals that's a great question so the grid is at the heart of utility operations it is what the infrastructure that carries electricity to household and to businesses improving the resiliency of grid is essentially improving the backbone of the entire infrastructure so there are several ways of this contributes to the decarbonization goals of the utilities number one is improving efficiency and reducing energy loss so accurately identifying false off equipment can help reduce energy loss and transmission and distribution network it means last power generation is required to deliver the same amount of energy to end users enabling renewable integration so the improved understanding of management of grid assets can facilitate integration of distributed renewable energy resources such as wind and solar so you will need to link up these new energy sources to the grid so in a way the surface area of utility operations is always expanding as we are looking at new renewable energy sources so resilience and strengthening grid assets to these you tell these sources of new energy is core to the operations and also there is an aspect of resource optimization there are a number of resources that are consumed in keeping the assets up to date on asset inspection we force a future where we are using more of the remote monitoring techniques rather than sending crews on pickup trucks to all the locations to do all the inspections all the time and then last but not the least there is preventative maintenance and improving the overall resilience aspect as well so maintaining the preventative maintenance increases the life of these assets and reduces the frequency of replacement of assets with newer assets when it's needed and ultimately if we are strengthening the grid we are also reducing the chances of inadvertent wildfires which as you know with the wildfires raging in a number of parts of the world are a major source of pollution major source of emissions in the world so improving the assets improving the resiliency managing vegetation around the assets is core to address the utilities decarbonization goals. I'm glad you talked about resiliency so I'm here in Austin Texas in the middle of a I don't even know how long now more than month-long 100 plus degree heat wave and a lot of people have been you know kind of expecting power outages they're they're not confident that the ERCOT can keep the power on so I've just been hearing a lot of that just from you know people who are not even in the industry so I think this whole conversation ties back to a conversation I had with one of your colleagues about customer trust and then so I actually was reading doing some research and I read a study that showed they said positive views that a utility is trustworthy require that customers believe that utility companies are doing a good job managing costs and wildfire risks so this whole you know the wildfires the resiliency the customers having confidence I think it all sort of ties together how do you see these things tying to customer trust and how can communicate how can utilities really communicate the efforts that they're making you know around preventing things like like wildfires. Utilities can gain and maintain trust of their customers with proactive outreach and informing preparing customers for wildfire season or even outages due to unavoidable conditions such as extreme weather. Generally speaking to build trust companies need to show humanity that demonstrate empathy and kindness and that they are treating their customers fairly companies need to show transparency with openly sharing information motives and their choices in a straightforward and plain language that their customers can understand companies need to demonstrate reliability consistently delivering on promises and experiences and in case there is an anticipated disruption in services such as outages due to extreme weather for example preparing their customers giving them a heads up and lastly companies need to show and demonstrate their capability to create quality product services experiences through various initiatives we talked about such as using advanced technology and and and appropriate change management by incorporating these traits in their outreach to customers utilities can build trust and and improve on their customer satisfaction. Yeah you're absolutely right but the Heatwave United States is or rather the entire world is facing we're seeing increased demand on the on the grid we're seeing increased pressure on the grid because heat does cause a lot the electricity consumption to spike and combined that with increased hot weather vegetation growing closer to the asset so it might cause service disruptions to say the least but then at an extreme end it may cause wildfires so the reliable service delivery is one of the top matrix that you know customers would want from their utility the last thing that customers want on a hot day is for their power to be turned off and then there is an aspect of safety assurance by efficiently mitigating wildfire risks utility utilities show a commitment to ensuring safety and well-being of their customers and community which is which is critical factor in gaining trust. There is an element of being transparent in the communication so sometimes during hot weather spell especially when it gets super windy it may become necessary to turn off the power to certain certain areas depending on the weather because high winds combined with hot dry weather can have can swing the power lines for example and they may inadvertently touch a vegetation that may be growing too close so while it may be necessary to do that but utilities that clearly communicate their risk mitigation strategy and actions while they are doing this to their customers show the transparency and that foster stress and so I personally live in California and I have sometimes received public safety power shutdown alerts that inform me that because of implement weather you may experience a power shutdown and we are doing this in order to keep our community safe and I as a customer understand that that it is necessary having lived through a wildfire season and having had a wildfire close to my home I completely understand that but in order to build that trust transparency and communication are really important and then lastly is environment responsibility so taking proactive steps to prevent wildfires also reflect the utilities commitment to environmental stewardship quality value increased by that you know some conscious customers that are concerned about the environment will find it valuable and finally there is a cost aspect to it proactively proactive risk mitigation can potentially save billions of dollars in damages so if a wildfire is initiated inadvertently it may cause you may expose utilities to millions of dollars in liabilities and fines I am really glad you talked about transparency because again just drawing on my personal experiences here in central Texas we had a really bad freeze just earlier this year 2023 not even the the winter storm Yuri one but people in Austin were without power for almost a week in some places and I think that they were pretty rightfully almost more upset about the fact that there was not really much information given about why or when the power might be restored and so people just really didn't know what was going on even though it wasn't necessarily the utilities fault that their that their power was out but I think if they had been a little bit more proactive in their communications and been more transparent than people wouldn't maybe wouldn't have been quite as as upset as they were and I think that they probably lost a lot of a lot of trust in the utility after that happened so so yeah I think those are all great points of transparency one especially rings true for me personally yeah yeah so utilities I'm glad you mentioned that I I believe utilities especially in California have put in a lot of effort and doing a good job at employing different communication strategies to inform customers about their efforts in strengthening the grid keeping the power on preventing wildfires and gaining trust so there are several aspects to it one is trusted and reporting where regular reports or newsletters detailing their risk mitigation strategy such as deployment of remote monitoring the progress of these initiatives shared with customer goes a long way in building that trust use of digital platforms so utilities have websites mobile app social media platform I follow southern California Addison on Twitter so they regularly tweet about the initiatives regularly tweet about how the crew in the field are keeping the power lines on and you can see in some of these pictures that crews are doing a really difficult job it's 100 degree plus weather and they are out in the elements and making sure the power to the the businesses and homes stays on so you develop a kind of appreciation for the effort that is being put in community outreach programs is another example webinar stone holes holes where you can you know dial in and listen on different engagement activities going on and then last but not the least is the the customer service training so the customer service representatives if they are well worst in the response to in these different initiatives and how to respond to customers if someone calls in with a specific request can go a long way usually when I have a power outage I'm able to go to a power outage map and even get an estimate on how soon the power will be restored so all of these you know different channels different outreach programs do go a long way in and gaining customer trust all right man deep well you're doing a lot of really important work and I really appreciate you sharing all the things that you're doing with us here today for people who are interested in these wildfires and resilience and customer trust topics or or other things that Deloitte is working on how can they stay up to stay up to date with you or get in touch with you people can certainly follow me on LinkedIn and I'll share the link with you those interested in field service can also follow Deloitte's landing page on field services that includes our field connect accelerator which we have built to improve the improve the field service performance of the field crew as well as the safety outcomes which is I'll provide the link to the landing page as well so between those two links think people can follow and learn more about services we offer and field service in general thank you