- Energy and utilities are entering a volatile “demand supercycle” driven by AI data centers, electrification, onshoring, aging infrastructure, and workforce turnover, and simply adding capacity is not enough to keep up.
- The core operational problem is fragmented, siloed data that limits visibility, slows planning, weakens compliance, and degrades customer experience—so organizations need a horizontal intelligence layer that unifies context across existing systems instead of isolated GenAI point solutions.
- A secure, permissions-aware Work AI platform like Glean can act as that intelligence layer, turning enterprise knowledge into actionable, role-specific insights across planning, compliance, engineering/field service, customer support, and training, while meeting strict security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.
Energy and utilities leaders are entering a demand supercycle, and the next decade is crucial for the industry. Data centers, electric vehicles, and domestic manufacturing are driving load growth that is faster and more volatile than past waves of industrial expansion. At the same time, aging infrastructure, complex regulations, and skilled labor shortages are testing the industry's ability to deliver enough supply.
- AI and data centers: Demand for AI-ready data center capacity is projected to grow more than 30% annually through 2030, with data centers expected to account for 7–12% of total electricity consumption in some markets.
- Electrification: Transportation, heating, and industrial processes are shifting from fossil fuels to electricity, driving new load profiles and peak behaviors.
- Onshoring and reshoring: Domestic manufacturing and reshoring efforts are reshaping where and how power is consumed.
- Aging infrastructure and outages: Much of the grid is decades old, and outages already cost U.S. utilities an estimated $150 billion annually in lost productivity and damages.
- Workforce shift: Nearly half of the energy workforce is expected to retire within the next decade. However, more than half of today’s utility workers have less than ten years of experience.
With these converging pressures, expanding capacity alone won’t be enough to meet demand. Instead, it will require a systematic approach to unlock insights from the data organizations already possess.
How fragmented data holds the industry back
The fact is that most energy & utility companies aren’t suffering from a lack of data; they suffer from a lack of context. Critical information is siloed across multiple enterprise systems, and teams struggle to access the information they need. This fragmentation creates four recurring challenges:
- Limited visibility across operations: Separate systems make it difficult to see the full picture across generation, transmission, production, and maintenance — slowing response times and extending downtime.
- Inefficient planning and forecasting: Capital-intensive decisions depend on unified views of geological data, production, load forecasts, and financials, but those inputs often live in disconnected silos.
- Disconnected customer and service experiences: Legacy systems across billing, outages, and communications make it hard to deliver proactive, digital-first service when customers need it most.
- Compliance and knowledge risk: Regulatory complexity is increasing, while institutional knowledge walks out the door as experienced workers retire — stretching compliance teams and making audits more painful.
GenAI point solutions alone aren’t sufficient to overcome these challenges. Oftentimes, they simply replicate the same fragmentation issues across individual tools and applications. What’s needed is a horizontal approach that provides shared context without requiring organizations to rip and replace existing systems.
A durable, horizontal approach
Energy and utility companies today are deploying intelligence layers that connect fragmented systems, preserve institutional knowledge, and turn data into decisions across planning, operations, and customer experience teams. Solutions such as a Work AI platform can:
- Connect core enterprise and operational systems without requiring a full re-platform.
- Surface the right technical documentation, maintenance history, and regulatory guidance in seconds
- Ensure every team is operating from a shared, trusted view of what’s happening and what to do next
Unlike traditional tools that work in isolation, Work AI platforms like Glean continuously learn from the information across your enterprise: engineering drawings, SOPs, incident reports, SCADA logs, contracts, emails, and case records. By building shared context, GenAI rapidly goes from another pilot to a production-grade capability that helps energy & utility companies keep up with today’s ever-increasing demands.
GenAI delivers impact from production to the grid
Through every stage of the energy and utilities lifecycle, routine work depends on having the right information at the right moment — whether you’re planning new capacity, dispatching crews, preparing a rate case, or explaining an outage to customers. A horizontal Work AI platform like Glean transforms these workflows by quickly providing recent, relevant, and permission-aware answers, grounded in the systems and documents you already use. That shared foundation is how Glean cuts across traditional silos and delivers value for planners, compliance teams, field operations, customer service, and training and workforce development.
GenAI for planning & forecasting
Planners can finally see a unified picture of financial, operational, weather, and demand data, instead of stitching it together manually from disconnected tools. They can aggregate capital project information into a single view, synthesize environmental analyses and bid packages, and combine operational data with forecast models to shorten planning cycles and rate case preparation.
GenAI for regulatory & compliance
Regulatory and compliance teams can retrieve decades of legal and safety documentation in hours instead of weeks, automatically enforce permissions across archives, and use agents to locate and evaluate HSE procedures or conduct compliance scoring.
GenAI for engineering & field service
On the operations side, engineers and field technicians gain an intelligent “front door” into everything from as-built drawings to past incident reports. Instead of hunting through shared drives and email threads, crews can ask natural-language questions and instantly pull up safety manuals, troubleshooting guides, and grid-asset documentation across generation, transmission, and retail operations — enabling predictive maintenance, faster restorations, and optimized production scheduling.
GenAI for customer service & support
Customer and service operations benefit from the same intelligence layer. By connecting CRM, billing, outage management, and communication systems, GenAI gives support teams a complete, contextual view of every customer interaction. Agents can triage tickets based on SOPs and case history, draft personalized outage communications when grid operations dispatch crews or initiate switching plans, and resolve complex issues faster.
GenAI for training & onboarding
Meanwhile, training and knowledge workflows ensure that institutional expertise doesn’t walk out the door as the workforce turns over. Organizations can accelerate onboarding with role-specific learnings drawn from real SOPs, incident responses, and troubleshooting logs. As teams become proficient at integrating GenAI into these workflows, they can automate more of the routine steps, standardize best practices, and turn tribal knowledge into repeatable guidance at the point of work — on the line, in the field, in the control room, and in front of the customer.
Security that enables speed and value without compromises
For energy and utilities leaders, GenAI can’t just be evaluated on ROI - but whether it can stand up to the same regulatory and operational scrutiny as the rest of your OT and IT stack. Glean is built on a modern, zero‑trust, least‑privilege architecture that mirrors how highly regulated organizations already manage risk. Rather than introducing a parallel security model, Glean plugs into your existing identity provider and access controls, so authentication, SSO, and conditional access policies continue to work exactly as they do today.
Just as important, Glean is fully permissions‑aware. It mirrors source‑system permissions in real time across 100+ connected applications, so users only see data they’re already allowed to access in systems like SCADA, EMS/DMS, document management, and productivity suites. As roles, groups, or project teams change, those updates are immediately reflected in what the assistant and agents can access or generate—preventing “AI side doors” that expose sensitive operational, customer, or regulatory content. Every query, action, and agent run is logged with rich metadata, giving security, audit, and compliance teams a detailed trail for investigations, attestations, and regulator reviews.
For organizations with stricter data residency or isolation requirements, Glean supports single‑tenant and private‑cloud deployment models, along with granular controls over what gets indexed in the first place. Active data and AI governance add another layer of protection on top of permissions: Glean can detect and automatically hide overshared sensitive content—such as customer PII, financials, or confidential project data—across your environment, and apply consistent policies for how that data is used by agents. The result is a Work AI platform that lets you give teams powerful GenAI capabilities while maintaining the same standard of security, privacy, and compliance you expect from any system touching grid operations, customer data, or regulated records.
Powering the next era of energy
Energy and utilities organizations already hold the knowledge they need to meet this moment. The bottleneck is that this knowledge remains fragmented across disconnected systems, documents, and teams.
A Work AI platform like Glean makes that knowledge usable — connecting 110+ systems into a single, secure intelligence layer so every employee can move faster, safer, and with more confidence.
Energy and utilities customers using Glean have seen measurable gains in reduced audit cycles, faster ticket resolution, improved uptime, and thousands of hours saved annually through automated quality and review workflows.
As demand grows and expectations rise, organizations that leverage connected intelligence will find success — the ability to understand, decide, and act at the speed the future requires.
Ready to see how Glean can help your team power smarter energy operations? Download the energy and utilities whitepaper or request a demo today.
