Artificial intelligence is transforming the utility industry, promising predictive maintenance, self-healing grids, and optimized asset performance. But there’s one critical reality that often gets overlooked: AI can’t see what you can’t measure.

Modern utilities are evolving fast, moving beyond reactive maintenance toward predictive, autonomous operations. This blog explores the six building blocks of the intelligent grid, a roadmap that helps utilities harness real-time data, automation, and AI to transform performance and reliability.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of Systems With Intelligence (SWI), a remarkable journey that began with a vision, a problem worth solving, and a small team of engineers who believed there had to be a better way to monitor and maintain critical utility infrastructure.

Many utilities view continuous monitoring as a future upgrade. But the truth is, it's already delivering measurable returns across the industry. This blog shows how delaying deployment leads to higher costs, greater risk, and missed opportunities to modernize.

Predictive maintenance is no longer an abstract goal, it's a practical reality. This blog outlines how utilities are phasing in continuous monitoring solutions with a scalable “crawl, walk, run” roadmap. Learn how to start small, build value, and position your utility for grid intelligence.

Traditional thermal inspections only provide a momentary snapshot of asset health. In today’s complex and aging grid, that’s no longer enough. This blog explores why utilities are moving toward continuous monitoring to reduce operational risk, improve reliability, and enable proactive maintenance.

The grid is a dynamic, distributed platform with rising expectations for resilience, efficiency, and adaptability. Transmission and distribution (T&D) utilities now operate in a landscape shaped by increasingly volatile weather events, workforce constraints, aging infrastructure, and mounting pressure to integrate renewable generation.

For utilities navigating the pressures of grid modernization, the transformer remains one of the most critical and vulnerable assets in the power system. These components are not only expensive to replace but can also take years to procure and install. A single transformer failure can cascade into major outages, regulatory scrutiny, and multimillion-dollar losses.

As electric utilities evolve to meet the demands of a distributed, digitized, and decarbonized grid, many are expanding their asset base to include more remote, unmanned sites. These include traditional substations to renewable generation facilities and battery energy storage systems (BESS). These sites are critical to the modern grid, yet they present a unique operational challenge: how to effectively monitor, secure, and maintain them without relying on frequent physical inspections.

Electric‑utility field crews are being pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand, the grid is expanding and becoming more complex, as distributed generation, battery storage, and extreme-weather hardening projects add thousands of new assets to the maintenance roster.