From Experimentation to Deployment
Jeremy Renshaw is EPRI Director of AI/Quantum. Ben Sooter is EPRI Director of Agentic AI and Micro Data Centers.
Most utilities are still early in their AI journey. A 2025 EPRI survey of more than 50 organizations found that while 91 percent have experimented with generative AI, only seven percent reported advanced or expert-level maturity. Nearly half remain in the early stages of adoption.
That gap between experimentation and deployment tells an important story. The biggest challenge facing the industry today is not access to AI. Rather, it is a combination of data readiness, trust, experience, and capability. However, without trust, none of the other factors matter.
Utilities already use AI in forecasting, asset management, wildfire mitigation, and knowledge retrieval, among many other applications. A key question that remains unanswered is what happens as these systems gain greater autonomy.