How AI and ‘Agents’ Will Come To Help Utilities

Utilities take notice: The next big wave in innovation in artificial intelligence, agents, is at hand.

With agents, the usefulness of AI will increase exponentially and enable businesses and governments to streamline their operations while making them more dependable, efficient and adaptable to circumstance, according to Satya Nitta, co-founder and CEO of Emergence, the futuristic New York-based computer company.

My reporting suggests that AI agents could have a revolutionary impact when applied to electric utilities, where AI is already making an inroad. Even small utilities and the regional transmission organizations (RTOs) are looking at ways of applying AI in their operations. 

David Naylor, president and CEO of Rayburn Electric, a rural electric cooperative association northeast of Dallas, told me, “Rayburn started looking at AI coming out of Winter Storm Uri. Our focus was on increasing our local load forecasting capabilities. We are continuing to evaluate other areas to implement AI, but it is a little early for a full embrace.”

I have found that Naylor’s remarks reflect a general feeling among the smaller utilities. The large ones are already embracing AI for a variety of tasks from vegetation control to possibly handing over distributed  energy resources (DER) to AI.

Agents are the first AI systems that can both speak with humans and each other conversationally, which may reduce some of the anxiety people feel about AI — this unseen force that is set to transform our world. These agents use AI to perceive their environment, make decisions, take actions and achieve goals autonomously, Nitta said.

The term “situational awareness” could have been created for agents because that is the key to their effectiveness. This omnipresent awareness is a constant in utility operations, where many parameters are constantly under scrutiny, and it is with autonomous vehicles (AVs).

AVs need a lot of awareness to be safe and operate effectively. They need every bit of real-time knowledge that a human driver needs on the roadway, including scanning traffic on all sides of the vehicle, looking out for an approaching emergency vehicle or a child who might dash into the road, or sensing a drunk driver.

Emergence is a well-funded startup, aiming to help big companies and governments by designing and deploying agents for their most complex operations.

Nitta and Emergence are designing agents to manage the needs of organizations, such as electric utilities and their grids, and government departments, like education and healthcare. Emergence, along with several other AI companies and researchers, has signed a pledge not to work on AI for military applications, Nitta said.

Talking about agents which would be built on open-source Large Language Models and Large Vision Models, Nitta said, “Agents are building blocks which can communicate with each other and with humans in natural language, can control tools and can perform actions in the digital or the physical world.”

Nitta explained further, “Agents have some functional capacity. To plan, reason and remember. They are the foundations upon which scalable, intelligent systems can be built. Such systems, composed of one or more agents, can profoundly reshape our ideas of what computers can do for humanity.”

This prospect is what inspired the creation of Emergence and caused private investors to plow $100 million in equity funding into the venture, and lenders to pledge lines of credit of another $30 million. 

Part of the appeal of Emergence’s agents is that they will be voice-directed and you can talk to them as you would to a fellow worker or employee, to reason with them, perhaps.

Historically, Nitta said, there have been barriers to the emergence of voice fully interfacing with computing. And, he said, there has been an inability of computers to perform more than one assignment at a time. Agents will overcome these blockages.

Nitta’s agents will do enormously complex things like scheduling the inputs into an electricity grid from multiple small generators or calculating weather, currents and the endurance of fishing boats and historical fish migration patterns to help fishermen. 

At the same time, they will be adjusting to changes in their environment, say, for the grid, a windstorm, or the fish are turning south not east, as expected, or if the wholesale price of fish has dropped to change the economics of the endeavor.

To laymen, to those who have been awed by the seeming impregnable world of AI, Emergence and its agent systems is reassuring because you will be able to talk to the agents, quite possibly in colloquial English or any other language. 

When I asked Nitta about the use of his technology in utilities, he told me that he thought they would have a great impact there. Although Emergence hasn’t yet tailored a system for a utility, it is keen to do so.