The utility industry is rapidly evolving. Increased competition and complexity, changed customer demands and stronger expectations on renewable energy options are challenging companies. Can the Nordic utility sector use AI, data and analytics to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs, improve demand planning, and enable a smarter infrastructure?
With the energy sector undergoing a period of rapid transformation, AI offers new solutions to manage the change. The drivers are about getting a competitive edge through a deeper understanding of B2B and B2C customer needs, behaviors and parameters impacting demand planning and forecasting.
“This is a sector with a huge digital and data transformation potential,” says Anoop Sharma, who is leading Cognizant’s Nordic AI and analytics practice. “Leaders are focusing on improving B2C channels, customer engagement, customer segmentation, and personification”.
Smarter energy solutions
Further, they work on accelerating the journey towards renewable energy options and handling the increasingly complex operations with new, smart energy solutions, optimizing networks, energy trading, and open data models where data is shared between traders, retailers and generators.
“We’ve seen successful business outcomes in use cases like preventive asset management, drone analytics, condition-based monitoring, and in applying AI to improve health and safety condition measures, resource and time optimization,” says Anoop Sharma.
Modernizing digital platforms
How do you make AI happen then? Leaders globally, as well as in the Nordics, are focusing on building a modern data ecosystem and a digital core by modernizing their legacy systems. This means moving to the cloud, creating coherent stories by joining the dots between silos of data and by enriching new data sources, using un-utilized dark data and applying industry-specific machine learning models, image analytics and (Natural-Language -Processing) techniques
As one of the major data and AI consultancy organizations in the world, with over 400 AI experts in the Nordics alone, Cognizant works to operationalize and implement data, AI, and analytics solutions at some of the world’s biggest companies.