Customer success stories: Real-world impacts of climate resilience initiatives

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
Welcome to the AiDASH Evolve 2024 podcast.
AiDASH makes critical infrastructure industries climate resilient and sustainable with satellites and AI. Evolve 2024 in New Orleans, Louisiana was our inaugural event. We gathered industry leaders, innovators and visionaries to explore how cutting edge technology and satellites and AI is safeguarding critical infrastructure and fostering biodiversity to ensure a sustainable future amidst climate change challenges. In this podcast series, we are recapping the entire event, every speaker and session. You can find it all on our content hub at ai-dot-com-slash-evolve2024 or check the show notes for all pertinent links. In this episode, we'll hear customer success stories about real world impacts of climate resilience initiatives. In this session, led by Isabella Espinel, product consultant and customer success at AiDASH, panelists discussed the challenges they faced in maintaining grid reliability and resilience and how their partnerships with AiDASH have helped. The expert panel consisted of Carl de Haan, Engineering Reliability Manager, and Powerco, New Zealand, Ryan Moe, Lead Specialist, Vegetation Strategy for National Grid, and Orlando McKoy, Director of T&D Asset Optimization and PMO, for Jamaica Public Services Company. The panelists discussed how their utilities face risks and challenges that include acquiring restoration resources after storms, changes in vegetation growth, and changes in wet and dry seasons. They talked about how having the right data, analyzing that data, and generating actionable insights from that data, allows utilities to make meaningful changes, including telling the story of what they're doing or not doing and why. And they talked about how this ability to quickly transform data into actionable insights will be crucial for the future. Advancements in technology are exciting too, but utilities need to maintain and value the core skills and expertise of people like engineers and arborists. Here's the panel led by Isabella.

**Isabella Espinel** (2:18)
Thank you all for joining us. And as you see, I'm joined by three incredible panelists. And so I want to take a minute to introduce myself and them, and then let them introduce their utilities so we all know who we're talking to. So as Rachel mentioned, I am a product consultant at AiDASH. I've been here for just about a year, and I partner with some of our customers to actually bring the solution to life. So after sales has done a great job, I come in and say, how do we solve your problems? How can I customize both our analysis, our approach, and even the actual interface of the web and mobile applications so that it suits your needs? And before that, I was a consultant at BCG, where I did a lot of problem solving for really large companies, and I really enjoy tackling some of the hardest things that are out there. I get to work with actually all three of these panelists in my daily job. We meet weekly with them and their teams. As we're going from, in some cases, pilot through multi-year deployment and expansions, and in other cases, clients who have been with us for a really long time, like National Grid. Here's a little bit about our panelists. First, we have Orlando McKoy. He is a director of T&D at the Jamaica Public Service Company. He has a lot of experience in engineering and transformation, and so he brings all that to JPSCo, as we refer to them, when we're on friendly terms, which is always. He will tell us today a bit more about the challenges that he faces. Next, we have Carl de Haan, who's come all the way from New Zealand at Powerco. He is a certified engineer, so he brings a really engineering approach and mindset to all of the challenges that they're facing down there.
We've actually just kicked off our multi-year deployment. So we've completed a pilot successfully together, and now we're in the phase of just scaling everything up across their quite a few different areas that we're going to be supporting them with. So that's really exciting. And finally, we've got Ryan Moe over at National Grid. And as you may have heard earlier from Abhishek, National Grid was our second customer, so we've actually been partnering with them for a long time, and they're the reason we've been able to develop a lot of the amazing features that many of you use today. And National Grid is a great partner in that sense, and so is Ryan. He has tons of experience in the utility space. He's really great at these operational excellence initiatives. And he's a key advocate for our success and for AiDASH and everything that we do. So we're looking forward to having you guys. And if I can ask Orlando first, could you tell us a little bit more about Jamaica Public Service Company and some of your goals in working with AiDASH?