SA Power taps AI to reduce field job "knockbacks"

SA Power Networks is testing the potential for AI to help it predict when it will encounter obstacles preventing field work from going ahead.

Principal SAP architect Travis Smith told attendees at SAP’s customer event in Sydney that the capability could help the energy provider reduce the number of field projects that are returned for replanning.  

“Sometimes … staff will go out to the field to do particular work and, for whatever reason, it can't go ahead. There's effectively a knockback so, it comes back into the office. 

"We have to see why, rescope it, replan it, and go back and execute that work,” Smith said.

Instead of sending teams out blind, Travis said that SA Power is exploring whether it can use AI to analyse historical work and job information to determine what they're likely to encounter on-site and the probability that they will need to cancel the job.

“Obviously there's some wins from a customer experience point of view, but also some internal operational efficiencies as well,” Smith said of the predictive capability.

Smith said that the capability is one of its early examples of using AI to reengineer a business process.

The energy provider has already deployed agentic AI for tracking and managing requests by external stakeholders including retailers and electricians.

Smith said that the internal facing part offered an assistant called ‘Ask AI’ which can process large amounts of data in unstructured formats, such as in manuals, into summaries to help serve external stakeholders more effectively.

Looking further ahead, Smith said that the SA Power is expecting to deploy SAP’s native AI functionality, including Joule – its built-in generative AI offering.

“We're in a testing phase across (SAP) Concur, SuccessFactors, and S/4HANA at the moment, and we're about to start on some business testing and hope to take that into production shortly with a pilot group and kind of right-size the change management, move it a bit faster, take some lessons, and then obviously scale it across the organisation with the appropriate change management that goes with that,” he said.