Powering up! How a shared foundation model is improving electrical grid management

The current hype around AI seems to involve figuring out how to apply LLMs (Large Language Models) to some new use case or another. For Amjad Karim, Keen AI founder and CEO, it started on the other side. While he was trying to improve risk management models for the UK’s National Grid, he wondered how recent innovations in emerging AI imaging techniques might improve predictive risk models in 2018, long before LLMs were even a popular thing.

The core insight was the need for models to support decisions on whether to refurbish, replace, or run assets to failure. Traditional approaches require skilled engineers to perform tasks that do not require their expertise, such as watching thousands of hours of video frame by frame. Karim explains:

A skilled team of engineers would watch these videos frame by frame, identify components on each tower, and score the condition of each component ...