Utilities are taking in more data than ever before, and managing this asset comes with its own set of challenges. Most agree it is better to have the data than not to, but several speakers at T&D World Live 2026 stressed that utilities must be cautious of the “garbage in, garbage out” effect and strive toward getting the highest quality data they possibly can to train models and inform decision-making.

Margaret Foy, a Senior Engineering Technical Specialist at ComEd, in a session about how ComEd built a hybrid communications network with private LTE, said good quality data has been a theme thorough the conference.

Foy said utilities should be thinking about use cases for their data, including those that haven’t materialized yet.

Angelique Gosse, operations leader at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), said in a session about the evolution of aerial drone inspections that operating models have to scale up with the volume of data coming in.

“Data must be organized so that it can be AI ready. It’s junk in, junk out, so data has to be standardized,” Gosse said. 

PG&E generates about 10 million aerial inspection images per year, and until recently was reviewing these manually. The utility has since looked to artificial intelligence to assist, but a human being is always in the picture, Gosse said.

“We keep humans in the loop always because after all it is their knowledge that AI is built off of. We want the system to always be human validated,” she said.

Jim Gill, Senior Director of Long Term Planning at PG&E, said his utility cannot back down on its grid hardening or wildfire mitigation efforts and is relying on technology to assist in these challenges.

“We will continue our grid hardening efforts. We can’t do this with individual programs,” Gill said. “Our approach has to be integrated. We have to rely on our technology, and that is going to have to come from the industry.”

At the same time, affordability remains a huge concern. Brian Chen, Vice President - Project & Field Engineering for Southern California Edison, said utilities are still beholden to their customers to justify any spending done on new technologies.

“Affordability is putting us in a difficult spot when we consider which technologies we want to fund. It’s making a lot of our folks uncomfortable and we need to be cautious about how we proceed,” Chen said.

Agreeing, Peter Muhoro, Chief Strategy, Technology and Innovation Officer for Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, added that data centers, new industry and growing residential areas are putting stress on utilities.

“If you’re in a utility and you’re not uncomfortable, something isn’t right,” Muhoro said. “I wish we had the capital to just deploy everything, but we just don’t,” he said, adding that Virginia, the state in which Rappahannock has its service territory, imported more than 40% of its power last year, partially as a result of data center activity.

Muhoro also said that his utility and others in areas that previously did not see many wildfires, are now having to educate customers about the threats of wildfires and the pros and cons of solutions such as undergrounding in a way that was not anticipated in years past.

Sara Wambles, General Manager of Asset Manage Governance at Duke Energy, agreed with the need to stay accountable to ratepayers while rolling out new technologies.

“As we add more intelligence and technology to the grid, we have to make sure our people know how it all fits together and can operate things seamlessly. We have to be more crisp in our training and make sure our workforce is along for the ride too,” Wambles said.

Data center operators prioritize costs and time in ways that are foreign to electric utilities, she said.

“We almost have to retrain how our technical folks think about their work because these processes are so different,” she said.