As utilities face more frequent extreme weather, rising wildfire threats and growing infrastructure costs, many are turning to artificial intelligence and geospatial intelligence to improve grid resilience. But according to a new Deloitte report, integrating those technologies across utility operations remains a work in progress.

The report, From Silos to Synergy: How Utilities Are Integrating AI and Geospatial Intelligence for Resilience, found that utilities are investing heavily in resilience technologies while working to overcome organizational and technology barriers that limit enterprise-wide adoption.

Deloitte notes that the United States has experienced 78 separate billion-dollar weather events over the past three years, contributing to longer outages and higher customer costs. Customer outage costs reached $121 billion in 2024, nearly double the seven-year average, while average outage durations have nearly doubled compared to a decade ago.

Those growing risks are driving significant utility investment. Investor-owned utilities were projected to spend a record $207.9 billion in capital expenditures in 2025, including roughly $30 billion dedicated to transmission and distribution adaptation, hardening and resilience. Spending on advanced resilience technologies increased 38% between 2023 and 2025, surpassing $8 billion.

"AI-enabled geospatial intelligence can help utilities target mitigation, optimize responses, and accelerate restoration by linking hazard exposure to asset condition, outage risk, and operational readiness," the report said.

Utilities Expanding AI Deployment

The findings are based on an April 2026 survey of executives from 60 investor-owned utilities operating across more than 40 states.

According to the survey, utilities are moving beyond pilot projects into operational deployment of AI. Asset inspections, condition monitoring, early fault detection and outage management represent the most mature applications. Infrastructure maintenance also showed the highest overall deployment rates, while planning and system design remain earlier in adoption.

More than 60% of utilities surveyed said they now dedicate at least 15% of their capital budgets to resilience initiatives. Grid hardening ranked as the highest investment priority, followed by vegetation management and grid automation.

The report also highlights how AI and geospatial technologies can improve storm preparation and restoration. By combining satellite imagery, weather forecasts, vegetation data and operational information, utilities can identify assets most at risk before severe weather arrives, allowing crews to prioritize tree trimming, stage equipment and position repair crews more effectively.

Integration Remains a Challenge

Despite growing investment, Deloitte found that many utilities continue to manage resilience through separate departments and disconnected systems.

Among surveyed utilities:

• Every respondent is either piloting or deploying traditional AI.
• Sixty-eight percent are piloting or deploying generative AI.
• Forty-two percent are piloting or deploying physical AI.
• Thirty-eight percent are piloting or deploying agentic AI.

However, only 10% of respondents reported achieving both high AI maturity and high geospatial maturity within their resilience strategies.

The report found that just 3% of surveyed utilities have fully integrated resilience planning across business functions with an enterprise strategy for measuring value.

Data silos and legacy technology remain the biggest barriers. More than half of respondents without centralized geospatial architectures cited disconnected data systems as a primary obstacle to broader integration, followed closely by aging technology infrastructure.

"This suggests the integration challenge is not only technological," Deloitte said. "Utilities should have clear ownership, governance, and cross-functional ways of working to connect decisions across operations, engineering, regulatory, finance, and technology functions."

Looking Ahead

The report concludes that utilities should move beyond deploying AI as individual operational tools and instead integrate geospatial intelligence into enterprise-wide planning, capital investment and regulatory strategy.

Among Deloitte's recommendations are embedding geospatial intelligence into investment planning, targeting high-return resilience projects, improving cross-functional governance, redesigning workflows and building interoperable data architectures.

"The next frontier of utility resilience is not incremental technology deployment but using geospatial intelligence to connect strategy, operations, and capital planning," the report concludes. "By moving from silos to synergy, utilities can become more reliable and resilient."