Electric utilities are turning to digital twins and artificial intelligence for more efficient operations

Both companies have a similar goal and have been around long enough – Sharper Shape was founded in 2013 and Buzz Solutions in 2017 – to see how the industry has changed today compared to before this current AI boom. There are some differences between the platforms – Buzz Solutions deals heavily with RGB images and photogrammetric models as well as thermal images, while Sharper Shape works with both RGB images and lidar data – but both see similar trends in the industry .

Both McDermott and Chaudhry, for example, point to three main functions that their customers are looking for these digital twins to automatically detect: asset inventory, potential maintenance issues and vegetation encroachment. For the first point, as McDermott points out in a conversation at the annual UAV Trade Show earlier this month, “Most utilities don’t know exactly where their assets are with absolute accuracy.”

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This is a view and Chaudhry, and therefore both systems will use artificial intelligence to automatically identify assets in their utility systems to accurately place them in spatial context. Generally, these solutions will include a library of assets in the software that customers can use, while also having the ability to “teach” their own assets to the AI.

One of the other big themes that came up in these conversations was the idea of ​​integrating these digital twins and the resulting insights into other systems. Like many other industries, the energy utility sector is experiencing something similar to what we know as “application fatigue,” having to wade through a handful of applications for a single piece of a project. Increasingly, we’re seeing solutions create integrations with larger platforms, something both Chaudhry and McDermott advocated. Both solutions are integrated with large systems such as SAP and IBM, with Chaudhry also touting Buzz Solutions’ integration with Esri’s ArcGIS and McDermott noting that Sharper Shape is often integrated with companies’ internal GIS systems.

“The main purpose of [our integrations] is that we don’t want this information to just be on a server that we own,” Chaudhry said. “We want that information to go back to utility so they can take quality action on their side.”

One of the other main themes that came up in both conversations was that while AI has certainly come a long way, and especially in recent years, it’s still not a wholesale replacement for human workers. Both express the idea that keeping a human in the loop is crucial to this work, and that AI is meant to help this work. McDermott, for example, talks about Sharper Shape’s confidence score, which serves as a way to prioritize areas that will still be manually inspected by human workers.

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Meanwhile, Chaudhry talks about their “human in the loop” feature, which came directly from a customer’s question. “It’s a key part of our software platform. It helps utilities use AI as a first-pass filter, and then subject matter experts provide their feedback. So it doesn’t have to rely solely on artificial intelligence.”

As many people in the tech industry will attest, we are still in the early days of artificial intelligence and digital twins. In many ways, in fact, they remain buzzwords. However, that is not the same as saying that they still need to provide any tangible value. The electric utility space is a prime example of an industry in dire need of a technology lift amid rapidly growing demand and a shortage of workers. As demonstrated by solutions from Sharper Shape and Buzz Solutions, among others, there is a lot of demand right now for ways to take images and lidar data and turn them into digital twins to streamline work and meet that demand growing.