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Sean Burri is an infrastructure engineer for Dominion Energy. This article reflects his personal views.
The narrative by now is all too familiar: Deploy artificial intelligence, stabilize the grid and eliminate outages. Executives repeat it. Journalists amplify it. Vendors sell it. And that simplification is terribly wrong.
AI has rapidly evolved from a laboratory innovation to a vital component of decision-making in the modern energy industry. Electric utilities worldwide are turning to AI-driven forecasting, outage response and optimization systems to improve reliability and sustainability.
But the notion that simply deploying AI automatically guarantees better reliability is a misunderstanding that is costing utilities real money and real credibility. Reliable performance depends on how utilities manage data governance, workforce training and infrastructure modernization, not on which algorithm they purchase.
