Every Decision Starts with the Customer
Exelon is a Fortune 200 company and one of the largest utility companies in the U.S., serving almost 11 million customers through six fully regulated transmission and distribution utilities: Atlantic City Electric, BGE, ComEd, Delmarva Power, PECO and Pepco.
Rob Biagiotti, VP of Enterprise Asset Management at Exelon, has responsibility for business investments across the company's work, asset, and AI portfolio. For him, every pressure on the grid is weighed against what customers expect and what they can afford. “So all those things put together influence almost every decision we make,” he says.
Strengthening the Core Engine
Exelon's journey with IFS began with a very old system and technical debt to retire. The bigger opportunity, though, was in what new technology could deliver. “In our case, we've been making major investments in a number of systems around our enterprise asset management, and we hadn't strengthened that core. That core engine that would drive all of that,” Rob explains.
With an old system and an incredible need to optimize the entire portfolio, it was the right time to act, and the challenges ahead called for a new approach. “We're not going to do that with legacy or archaic thinking,” says Rob. Exelon needed the very best tools, analytics and data, so it brought everything together holistically and started making small bets that will lead to much bigger outcomes.
Leading From the Future
Exelon has set long-term strategic imperatives many years out. “We like to lead from the future, not start with the present,” says Rob.
One example is perfect blue sky reliability. “On a perfectly clear day, customers should not expect to have an outage,” he says. Exelon works backward from that goal, identifying the business capabilities and drivers that would enable it. Starting with the outcome increases creativity and changes how projects come together. “This is not an IT project. It's how we're going to enable those most strategic outcomes for our customers and our employees,” Rob says. “Quite honestly, they deserve better from these tools as well.” Exelon has found that an outcome that benefits customers often benefits employees too, and that smart solutions, implemented the right way, solve a wide variety of challenges at once.
Thinking End to End, Delivering in Smaller Pieces
Exelon's early approach treated each problem as belonging to a single system. “We were way too siloed in our original thinking about how we were gonna solve challenges. It was an EAM challenge. It was a customer billing system challenge. It was a mobile dispatch challenge,” says Rob. Today, the focus is on end-to-end processes and how they interrelate, which Rob believes optimizes the whole spectrum of systems and allows Exelon to deliver much faster.
Jim Calabrese, Vice President of IT Operational Platforms at Exelon, pairs ambition with discipline. “I think you first have to think very big,” he says. “Because you really wanna transform and not just tweak and adjust in small ways.” At the same time, “you have to have a way to break these very large transformations into smaller pieces that help you derisk the execution of that, but also learn along the way.” That takes a management team willing to be held accountable for delivering outcomes for each piece. “So you can kind of almost earn the next tranche of money, if you will, to be able to continue to go forward,” Jim says.
Where AI Can Make a Difference
Jim sees three obvious starting points for AI at Exelon. The first is productivity: "there should be a whole bunch of productivity we can unlock with AI." The second is customer insights, giving customers better ways to use their energy, interact with Exelon and get answers to their questions. The third is assets, where "we should be able to optimize in a much better and more thoughtful way in how we utilize our assets."
"And I think that's just scratching the surface," he says. Jim sees these early uses as stepping stones to "connections between different types of agents, and AI helping to build upon other AI to create even more opportunities." That's why he recommends starting small. "I think it's really important to get started with these smaller, more obvious cases," he says. "Learn from that and then grow into something more substantial."
Doing More with What We Have
With skilled workers in short supply, Exelon has to get more from the time it has. "I haven't been able to invent more or find more hours in my day," says Rob. "We've got to do more with what we have." He is clear about the role AI will play: "AI is absolutely part of that equation." If AI and other analytical engines can shave just five minutes off a technician's journey, across thousands of journeys every day, the benefits add up for the environment, efficiency and customer satisfaction. "I can't imagine any problem that we need to solve that advanced analytics wouldn't be the first place we would go to ask that question."
Jim sees AI changing how knowledge moves through the workforce. "Getting the knowledge out of our employees or our aging employees is really a lot easier and enabled with AI," he says. As AI starts to take the place of subject matter experts, "our ability to ask good questions to get to the information is going to be more key." AI can also help people coming into the workforce find their way around the company. Through what Jim calls agent assist, it can help employees do what they need to do across different parts of the organization.
Smarter Decisions Before, During and After Outages
"There's a saying in the utility industry, the best outage to have is the one that doesn't occur," says Rob. Preventing outages starts with hardening the system, and that depends on analytics: making the right asset investment decisions at the right moment and embedding technologies such as circuit segmenting.
When outages do occur, large-scale events become a massive coordination effort. Rob points out that "these planning and scheduling tools, they shouldn't just be used on perfectly calm days." They can be optimized to get the right resources out when scaling up.
AI could also change how mutual aid works. Exelon's employees are spread across multiple states, and AI could help crews moving between Exelon utilities understand design and operational differences. It could also help contractors and other utilities from outside the Exelon family get up and running by understanding Exelon's terminology and even translating it into terms that make sense to them.
Seeing What Connected AI Can Do
Rob admits that, from an AI perspective, "I've always thought about it in a very siloed manner." That changed during a trip through Europe with IFS, meeting companies from Norway, Australia and the U.K., where he saw that "there's incredible work being done to pull together AI engines through agents and coordinate that work." "Even levels above what I had anticipated," he says. The timing surprised him too: "This isn't three years away. We heard, in three to six months, there could be advances." Rob believes that putting it into play as soon as possible brings benefits sooner, because "you'll learn faster, and you'll get more comfortable with it."
Jim sees agents changing how Exelon's systems work together. He thinks of AI as "something that maybe could even replace some of the integration we do between our systems." If one agent knows how to work in one platform and another agent knows another, employees could use those agents to get their work done. "Maybe we do less technical integration."
Bridging Decisions with IFS and AI
Looking ahead, Jim sees AI and IFS solutions helping Exelon bring tactical, operational and strategic decisions together. "I think there's tremendous opportunity there," he says.
Tactically, that means helping people know what to do and how to do it, "looking for really good best practices as they're doing their job," with answers to questions like "What's the engineering standard for this thing?" On the operational side, he says, "I think there's a huge opportunity when we have major events, for example, to pre stage crews and materials where they need to be." Strategically, it means pulling Exelon's portfolio investments together to test whether they enable the strategy, which investments to make and where the gaps are. "We could maybe use AI and IFS solutions to help us think through how we enable that strategy."
