From the keynote stage at SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG, SAP’s Michael Sullivan got a room of utility professionals to finish a nursery rhyme in unison, then stumped them with three words. The exercise made a point that kept resurfacing in San Antonio: AI can only be as useful as the context it’s given and the people who are involved.

Over the rest of the conference, SAP and its customers examined that idea from different angles — and levels of skepticism.

High-Level Vision, Real-World Examples

Day one brought it down to the operational level. Summit Utilities described what its governance team uncovered by scrutinizing every field in its Smart Forms, and what that meant for the crews who fill them out. Avista’s Erica Ellis shared lessons from mapping a sprawling application landscape ahead of SAP S/4HANA.

The utility has more than 1,600 applications to account for along the way, and in the day-one recap, Ellis explains where she would tell any utility in that position to begin.

The Lab Meets the Field

On day two, SAP’s Matt London framed the morning keynote around a hypothetical customer hoping to expand by next summer and a transformer maintenance job that might stand in its way. Then, attendees were shown real-time demos of the types of AI capabilities Sullivan teased in his keynote. Agents vetted billing exceptions and processed grid connection requests, bringing in a person with a recommended fix wherever a decision was needed.

In the afternoon, leaders from Salt River Project, Southwest Gas, and Hydro One answered the community’s questions and were candid about how much groundwork remains before agents can be trusted with consequential decisions. ​“I think that we need to take a step backwards in order to be able to march forward,” Sarah Peluso-Ibarra of Southwest Gas said of the data and AI governance work her organization wants in place first.

Why did one piece of Southwest Gas’ data work take nearly five years to finish, and what are its technicians up against at customers’ doors?

The day-two recap has those answers, along with the decisions panelists would never hand to a machine and this year’s SAP for Utilities Excellence Award recipients.

A Shared Road to Readiness

SAP showed what agents can do with the right context, and the utilities made clear that readiness has to come first. SRP’s Gibs Saint Paul reminded peers that no utility has to get there alone. ​“I think the utility industry has a large voice,” he said. ​“For multiple reasons, we should use it and do it together.”

Next year’s gathering in San Diego will show how much of that collaboration takes hold.