celebrate our 2025 winners!
VegetAtIon Management
Vegetation overgrowth is a huge problem for utility infrastructure. The current process for monitoring, identifying, and addressing areas of concern is very costly, time-consuming, and inefficient.
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This year's winning hackathon team presented an A.I. vegetation management solution that replaces costly helicopter assessments with drones and an A.I. model capable of analyzing hundreds of thousands of photos, prioritizing areas of concern, and creating required work orders and dashboards to aid in resource optimization.
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The estimated cost savings of this proposal is in the MILLIONS! And the efficiencies gained would allow utilities to better serve customers, prevent costly power outages, increase safety for workers and the communities they serve, while preserving critical infrastructures and meeting regulatory requirements.
And the WINNERS are...from Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD), left to right: Tate Olsen, Andrew Daro, Allen Vornhagen, Cory Hanson, Erik Weinmeister, (not pictured: Jeff Kosch)​
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Watch the recap video to see highlights of this year's event, as well as the winning team!
So many great ideas!
So many of the innovative ideas presented hold promise for development and implementation to affect the industry NOW. We may have had one winning team for this event, but all of our participants learned new skills and inspired each other to bring back innovative changes to their companies. Check out some of the other featured topics. Which ones are your favorites?
PowerComply AI: Streamlined Documentation Access​
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AMP
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This team built Powercomply AI which is a GPT model that scours regulatory documents to help navigate regulatory compliance.
​The solution provides information in multiple languages and saves queries for future reference.
Sherm: AI Bot for Information Retrieval​
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SANTEE COOPER/TEA
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This team developed an AI bot, Sherm, to streamline the information retrieval process. Sherm enables employees to effortlessly access all relevant documents for comprehensive understanding and deeper collaboration.​
AcuIntake: Hands-Free Voice-to-Text Reporting for Utility Teams​
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TEA
Developed a speech-to-text tool that records field workers' observations while inspecting assets. These reports can happen hands-free, over Slack, etc., and get pushed into a Power BI dashboard.
PENNY: Field-ASSIST A.I.​
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TEA, JEA, COWLITZ
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FieldAssist AI introduces a hands-free, voice-activated solution. It leverages computer vision, NLP, and predictive analytics to streamline operations. A field worker can check an asset, and submit reports and spreadsheets hands-free. This solution also includes a dashboard for tracking asset health.
TRADE BAE: BILATERAL AUTOMATED ENTRY​
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TEA
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Developed a speech-to-text-tool that runs trader calls through a speech-to-text engine using Chat GPT, then compares the details of the deal entered by a trader to what it heard on the call.
ACCESS ALL INFO: documentation query tool​
​JEA, TEA, OWATONNA
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This team (represented by participants from multiple companies) built a Chat GPT bot that looks at document revision history to efficiently hone in on the changes made to large amounts of documentation.
Supply Chain Disruptions: Assessing the Impacts of Tariffs on Utilities​
CU, JEA, HUNTSVILLE, ROCHESTER
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The team acted out a scenario where the president of a utility wanted to know how the new Canada and Mexico tariffs would impact items that need to be purchased in the future (transformers, steel, etc.). The team used OpenAi with two data sources - one of which uses harmony codes that tell the material country of origin and compares them to purchase orders to let the user know the potential financial impact of certain scenarios.
