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I’ve been meaning to share some photos from last week’s NCEC conference in Wilmington, NC. This was my first visit to that part of the US, and really liked it - next time I’ll go back for fun.

The back story about the rural utility market was covered in this earlier post, and for this post, I’m mainly just sharing some photos for the vibe of the event. More analysis and takeaways can be found in my latest No Jitter post - here - and I’ll be talking about it as part of our next Watch This Space podcast episode, which will publish just after Labor Day.

For more background, here are my takeaways and photos from last year’s conference.

A follow-on writeup is also in the works, focusing on two pressing security issues for utilities - both cyber and physical. The conference had very interesting sessions on each topic - stay tuned.

In short, this is the world of utility co-ops, which basically serves the non-urban population, and just like everyone else, they’re struggling to modernize and adopt new technologies, especially AI.

Customer service is an important vector for this, and I presented on the role of AI for making CX better. Later in my session, I was joined by Hardy Myers from Cognigy to talk about real-world examples where their AI technologies are being used now to improve CX.

This is a very interesting vertical that I’ve been involved with for over 15 years, and I find that many of their challenges are similar to what we experience in the communications technology space.

Below - opening panel session with industry execs talking about making the grid more resilient and reliable; view from the show floor

Casey Werth from IBM talking about the role of AI for modernizing utilities; signage for my breakout session with Cognigy on Conversational AI in the contact center; from the show floor - I believe this is a current transformer - utilities are very hardware-intensive, just like telcos used to be

Two fascinating keynote sessions and speakers. First, Jesse Tuttle - “Hackah Jak” - talking about the dark side of hacking and cybersec - yeow. Second is two speakers from CACI - Lance Manthey and Chuck Jackson. Both are ex-Marines, providing a very sobering, military perspective on how vulnerable utility infrastructure is to attacks, along with how they conduct threat assessments. More on both of these sessions later.

My breakout session on Conversational AI and CX for utilities (photo: Josh Conner, NCEC), and a selfie with Jesse Tuttle and his off-the-charts sharp daughter/protege, Reese.