People occasionally ask why I push AI adoption as hard as I do. It’s a fair question, and the honest answer isn’t the organisational one about efficiency and productivity. It’s more personal than that.
Every utility I’ve worked in has the same shape of problem. Demand for our internal services always exceeds supply. Backlogs grow. And when interesting, transformative work comes along, we often hand it to third parties, because our own people are consumed keeping the lights on. The dull, repetitive, necessary work stays in-house. The fun stuff gets outsourced. I have always hated that equation.
AI is the first technology I’ve seen that can genuinely flip it.
If agents can carry a meaningful share of the repetitive load, the monitoring, the first drafts, the data wrangling, the routine analysis, then our people get to move up the value chain. The engineer spends more time engineering. The analyst spends more time on the question and less on the extract. The backlog that frustrates our customers starts to shrink. And the interesting work stays with the people who know our business best, rather than being bought by the hour.
I want to call out the elephant in the room, because in every forum someone is thinking it. This is not about cutting people. Utilities like ours operate under real headcount and budget constraints, and the scrutiny to be more efficient is only increasing. We meet that pressure either by doing less, spending more on external resources, or amplifying the people we have. Only one of those is a future I want to lead.
There’s also a personal dimension. Everyone in our organisation is going to navigate this transition somewhere. I would rather they build those skills with us, supported, and ready for a future where they are not replaced by someone who uses AI.
That’s my why. Capability and capacity, not headcount. If you’re leading this in your own organisation, it’s worth being able to answer the question just as plainly.