The water utility industry is facing a wave of change, and artificial intelligence (AI) offers a powerful toolkit to navigate this transformation. But where do you start? Implementing AI can seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be. Here are ten quick wins your utility can leverage to see tangible results and build momentum for broader AI adoption.
1. Meeting Summaries on Autopilot: From department meetings to board meetings, products like Microsoft Copilot can “attend” your meetings and produce a meeting summary and list of actions. It’s great for summarizing all the key discussion points, getting action items and formulating meeting minutes – treat them as a good draft, but always be sure to review and check for accuracy.
2. Intranet Chatbot for Instant Access to Information: Empower your employees with instant access to crucial information. Integrate a chatbot (there are many to choose from) into your intranet, providing quick answers to questions about policies, SOPs, and procedures. This streamlines workflows, helps with onboarding and training, and reduces the burden on internal support teams.
3. Jumpstart Content Creation: From RFPs to public outreach materials, AI can help you overcome the blank page. Tools like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini can learn from your existing documents and generate solid drafts, saving you time and effort. This allows your team to focus their time on refining and finalizing the content rather than overcoming writers block.
4. Conquer Information Overload: Drowning in emails and documents? AI can help. Tools like Microsoft Copilot for 365 can summarize content in seconds. Imagine summarizing long email threads or getting a quick overview of a report before a meeting. You can even have the AI read the summary to you.
5. Cultivate an "All Things AI" Hub: Create a central repository on your intranet for all things AI. Include prompts, crowdsourced use cases, downloadable tools, videos, and, crucially, up-to-date policies on AI governance and compliance. This fosters a culture of AI literacy and encourages employees to explore its potential. Sharing common AI prompts for different roles (customer service, planning, operations, etc.) can be particularly helpful.
6. Capture Institutional Knowledge: Don't let valuable experience walk out the door. Use AI to capture the knowledge of retiring employees. Interview them using tools like MS Teams or Zoom, utilize transcription services, and then summarize the content with AI. Take it a step further by creating in-house video tutorials or using tools like Guidde to generate AI-powered training videos.
7. Chart Your Digital Future: Feeling overwhelmed by the need to modernize? A Digital Roadmap (or Digital Master Plan) is a small but essential investment. It provides a long-range vision for your "digital utility," outlining the steps, timelines, and budgets needed for a successful transformation. Digital utilities see better ROI, make informed decisions, and attract top talent.
8. Data Science on Demand: Water and sewer utilities face unique operational challenges and have data that they are not fully leveraging. Data Science-as-a-Service (DSaaS) offers a custom solution for applying data science to specific problems without the need for hiring full-time staff or purchasing expensive software. This allows for data-backed decisions quickly and efficiently.
9. Embrace Strategic Partnerships: The pace of technological change feels overwhelming but you don’t have to face it alone. Jump start your efforts by identifying time-consuming, redundant tasks and then identifying partners (existing or new) who offer new AI features/services to assist. An example where water utilities have jumpstarted their AI journey is using predictive modeling for Lead & Copper Rule compliance (as accepted by most of the US states) to identify unknown service line materials. Other examples of areas to target could be around capacity planning, data integration, public outreach, customer complaint tracking, compliance reporting, etc.
10. Set AI goals this year: By setting simple, practical goals at the director and/or manager level to explore and test AI tools/practices within their teams is an effective way to investigate AI solutions and explore adopting workflows into everyday operations, planning activities, etc. By reporting out on a quarterly basis, provides opportunities to assess what is working and build on those efficiencies.
By implementing these simple steps, your utility can start to benefit from the power of AI, making operations more efficient, encouraging new ideas, and ultimately providing better service to your customers. Don't delay – begin your AI journey today!
