OATI President and CEO Sasan Mokhtari published a commentary in POWER Magazine exploring why utilities are eager to adopt AI but remain skeptical of general-purpose tools that weren’t built with the grid’s complexities in mind.
The article draws on OATI’s experience deploying energy-native AI at the California ISO, where OATI’s AI Genie™ platform reduced daily outage processing time from six hours to 30 minutes by proactively analyzing outage notes, applying operating procedures, and drawing on 30 years of historical grid data — while keeping human operators in full control of all critical decisions.
Mokhtari argues that generic AI tools risk producing authoritative-sounding outputs that lack understanding of power flow physics, reliability standards, and congestion management. The utilities that succeed in the AI transition, he writes, will be those that select solutions with energy-native architectures and pair them with human oversight.