“If that was proven with our data, it was something we could do because we were moving slowly. We built the foundation in terms of cloud capabilities before we made that analysis and committed to putting it into practice,” he said.
“The other thing is that there is growing expectations that things will be strengthened with AI, and it's not just the workforce.
“We are at the forefront of the energy transition, and our customers expect smarter information about their energy: news and information about how their home and their organization moves.”
Black said clarification of business issues is important in helping customers, such as Energy Queensland, explain the business case for technology investment.
“This is not technology that drives business. It is a business that defines business,” he said.
This includes looking at what you were doing to reduce risk, cost optimization, and more.
“It's just trying to balance it,” he said. “We feel that we are partners and we define the issue in advance, and the business case speaks mostly in itself.
“Then we can talk about the value it offers, the risk it reduces, or what the investment driver is for that investment.”
Top-down support from the management team was essential for Smith at SA Power Networks.
“We are making many other areas of our business innovative, from the future of our network perspective,” he said. “There's no shortage of support.
“We're just trying to figure out the various building blocks and infrastructure along the way, and we're trying to make sure we put those things in the right place.”
SA Power Network and Energy Queensland discussed high-level strategy, governance and careful AI rollouts, but the education sector took a different approach.
SAP Partner Discovery Consulting noted that educational customers focus on practical, targeted AI applications already in use, such as skill matching and teacher scheduling.
Alistair Elliott, managing partner at the consulting firm, said when education departments adopt new technologies like SAP, individuals among them are considering skills to help them manage their performance and goals.
This is done with predictive AI, with the focus of matching the appropriate individual and subsequent analysis.
“There's a five-day gap through planned, unplanned absences, and there's a lot of cases where casual may only be able to do Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday,” he said. “What you find is that the administrator is used to find the perfect or the same person to go to.
“What we just found with predictive AI is what we put in the tool is finding and suggesting people who actually have the ability to do that.”
This will fill these casual spots with spreadsheets and phones much faster than before, Elliott explained.
We'll bring you the top to your AI journey
The central focus of AI integration within these organizations was the need to bring everyone from above the journey.
“We're in an industry with dangerous assets and we have a safe culture,” Black said. “We have managed to evolve the same thing that safety is not an afterthought, and it is embedded in our work.
“Cyber is in front of the mind, and we expanded the safety paradigm. We did that through education. Many education at different levels, from executives and boards to all people.”
According to Black, this was a very similar journey to Energy Queensland's AI, with many of the basic tasks not just guardrails and frameworks. It helped to build education and build that whole workforce.
“That's how we're working on it. It really focuses on that internal education,” he said. “If we have a common base, that opens the door for more conversation.”
For Chen, SA Power Networks not only allows “everything comes back to trust at the end of the day”, but also allows for a key role in trust throughout the organization.
“AI-style ency programs start from the top,” he said. “give [internal employees] What to clarify [certain] All terms mean what they actually mean in terms of how they can help with business problems.
“The interesting thing is, we're first working to make sure management has the right concepts of how and how to understand how to wrestletter AI in its executive strategy layer.”
At the same time, Chen said the team is building this community of practice for peer-to-peer learning and sharing.
“The other part that comes from our IT department is making sure we speak the language of our stakeholders,” he said. “We don't just try to understand what our work really means, we don't just understand what their top priorities are.
“If you have problems building trust, it's when AI appears to be a problem-free solution.”
To bridge the gap between data scientists and engineers, SA Power Networks said it was “literally” to bring these teams together and listen to floor conversations.
“They're jumping in, they're becoming more curious and trying to understand what's really going on in that scenario,” he said. “I actually came to IT from our asset management department, so sometimes I talk about cold top transformers.
“It's about making sure they build such relationships and friendships with the people next to them. It's very human.”
Another thing the organization did was actively bringing UX designers to Chen's team.
“Even that feels like a strange combination of skill sets, but the more you do automation and agent AI, the more you get to understand where people contribute most,” he said.
“It's about human interaction with humans. It's about it. [being] A more empathetic, more emotional aspect of things that people can really contribute.
“It's not just code and statistics, but core skills set in my data science team.”
Having this type of engagement was just as important on the service provider and customer side, Elliott said.
“We are trying to create stakeholder engagement and strategic planning with the group to ensure that we are doing it internally and in a variety of ways from a change management perspective,” he said. “We are partners working with our customers, so we can only succeed if we know what the journey they are coming.
“We're successful if customers know the path they need to move forward or if they recognize and agree.”
