When Technology Operations Manager Mike Seblani describes what his team at BC Hydro is navigating, the challenge sounds deceptively simple: move people off paper and onto a platform. But the reality, as he explained to a group of SAP utility customers in a recent webinar, is considerably more human. Crew leads had their weekly plans on whiteboards. Workers are attached to their existing calendars.  

Meetings, site visits, lunches—those informal rhythms of field operations—don’t fit neatly into a standard work order process. The operational goal is to migrate these manual workflows into SAP’s specialized digital tools, including SAP Field Service Management (FSM) for complex dispatching and SAP Service and Asset Manager (SAM) for mobile execution. But Seblani emphasized that before a utility can leverage those advanced platforms, it must first surmount the culture shock of basic digitization.  

“The group is coming from a paper process, so you can just imagine what it would mean,” Seblani said. “Just moving to a standard Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) process alone is very significant. That uptick is going to take a while before we get there.” 

The Map as Command Center 

In 2020, SAP had zero FSM customers in the utility sector. Today, that number exceeds 80, spanning gas, electricity, water, and renewables, with 20 joining in the past year alone. Ryan Jones, Solution Manager, SAP FSM & EAM, walked through what that growth has required the product to become. 

Dispatchers working in the service map can now toggle Geographic Information Systems (GIS) layers such as meters, infrastructure overlays, and routes directly within the interface, overlaying geographic data with live work order and technician information. Navigating over a technician icon renders a quick-view panel: their role, current status, and current assignment. 

Introduced in the Q4 2025 release, the lasso feature accelerates high-volume dispatching in confined geographic areas. A dispatcher draws a polygon on the map around a cluster of jobs, selects a technician, and drags the entire selection onto that technician’s schedule, where assignments are made automatically according to predefined scheduling policies. Skills validation is embedded in the same workflow; drag a job onto the wrong technician, and the system flags the conflict immediately. 

Crew management received equal attention in the same release. The most consequential change is the shift to partial-day assignments, which allows a single technician to be assigned to different crews at different points of the same day, down to the minute.  

In the demo, a technician named Tatiana appears fully staffed on an overhead line crew through the morning. By afternoon, she’s been reallocated to a substation upgrade crew, the transition tracked and visible across both assignments. Auto-scheduling logic, previously available for individual technicians, now extends to entire crews. 

The AI Teammate 

Visualizing work solves a different problem than volume. One customer on the FSM platform is processing 33,000 automatically scheduled jobs per day—a scale no manual dispatching workflow can sustain. The Field Service Dispatcher Agent, now in beta, is SAP’s direct response to that reality. 

The Dispatcher Agent isn’t designed to be fully autonomous by default. It acts as a cognitive offload, outsourcing the computation of constraints, priorities, and tradeoffs, with the dispatcher’s judgment still governing what actually gets committed.  

A dispatcher describes what they need in plain language: schedule these jobs within the next two weeks, using the service-level agreements (SLA) policy. The AI agent analyzes the request, applies the relevant constraints, and returns a proposed schedule along with an optimization report. Nothing is committed until the dispatcher reviews and confirms it. 

The same underlying policy framework does support fully autonomous scheduling runs triggered by predefined business rules, which are distinct from the agent’s human-in-the-loop model. The demo showed this applied to storm mode, in which a simulation previews proposed schedule updates before they go live, allowing real-time response as conditions change.  

Across the full FSM platform in 2025, 113 million jobs were auto-scheduled, with 1.5 billion business rules executed—each governing a constraint such as SLA priority, technician eligibility, or travel limit. 

AI Comes to the Field 

SAP’s Senior Director of Product Management, Kunal Mehta, highlighted two directions of expansion in the most recent releases. The external contractor persona, available as of the 2511 release, integrates with FSM and crowd service to bring third-party workers into the same mobile execution environment as internal crews, a meaningful addition for utilities that rely heavily on contract labor. 

The most concrete AI change for technicians is job completion by voice. Say a technician has just finished a transformer repair and dictates his notes, “275 euros in expenses for replacement parts, outlet in the pump assembly has a rupture.” The AI populates the relevant form fields automatically.  

When the technician needed to amend his hours and add an inspection reminder, he re-recorded, and the app updated instantly. Available since the app’s Q2 2025 release, the feature reduces the administrative burden at the moment when it’s most disruptive (mid-job, in the field). 

A separate AI capability targets organizations still running paper-based processes. SAP is building a migration tool that scans an existing paper form or PDF and converts it directly into a digital, dynamic form, without requiring anyone to manually rebuild it in an editor.  

On the infrastructure side, offline capabilities have been extended with support for mobile map packages and vector-based maps, critical for field workers who regularly operate outside reliable network coverage. 

Customer-Driven Evolution 

None of these capabilities landed fully formed from a product lab. Senior Product Manager William Chou walked through the structure of the utilities-specific Customer Advisory Group, with roughly 10 to 12 utility customers from around the world meeting monthly since August, working through the workflows that define their field operations. 

From that engagement, the team identified five priority use cases—vegetation management, pole inspection, emergency response, meter management, and service line maintenance—united by a common characteristic of being heavily map-dependent workflows that require field workers to navigate, search, and act on geographic context.  

This thread connects directly to the map-based dispatching investments in FSM. The same spatial logic that helps a dispatcher lasso a cluster of jobs is what a field technician needs to locate and execute them. Features currently in development include draw-to-search, GPS tracking, breadcrumb trails, dynamic forms embedded directly in guided workflows, and improved error handling for offline-to-online transitions. 

Seblani pointed attendees toward a complementary mechanism, the Customer Influence Site, where more than 266 enhancement ideas are currently logged and open for community voting. The highest-voted items carry real weight with the product team.  

He put the challenge plainly: if the most-voted items don’t reflect where the product actually needs to go, the voting isn’t doing its job. 

From Platform to Podium 

As the technology matures, the conversation is shifting from feature requests to implementation stories. Beyond BC Hydro’s own initiatives, the industry is in motion; Dominion is approaching go-live, with active projects underway at PG&E and Southern California Edison. Those stories are worth telling.  

The community will have multiple venues to share their experiences and learn from their peers. Upcoming events include SAP for Asset and Service Management Americas in Houston in March, SAP for Energy and Utilities in Toulouse, France, and SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG in San Antonio later in the year. 

The tools are already granular enough to auto-fill a technician’s field notes from a voice memo; the roadmap points toward vegetation management routing, offline map navigation, and the other complex, geography-driven workflows the field actually runs on.  

The distance between where the industry started and where these platforms are heading is closing, driven as much by the customers shaping the roadmap as by the engineers building it.