Utilities
At American Electric Power, a small team builds the plan for where the power will come from. The work lives in a planning workbook, and each AEP operating company has its own regulators and deadlines.
The team used an AI tool from Energy Exemplar, the company that makes its planning software, to fill in the workbook inputs. Mohamed Abukaram, AEP's director of resource planning and operational analysis, said the tool, PLEXOS Intelligence, "did 70 to 80 percent of the work, and we got a successful model run based on those inputs."
Energy Exemplar says the analysts stayed in control.
The time savings are the vendor's to claim, and it claims two. Its page says updates went "from three weeks to three days." Further down, the same page says the team cut "a three-week data update into a day."
One AEP analyst, Papa Yaw Owusu-Obeng, made a guess: "Working on a resource screening workbook can take maybe two weeks. My guess is now it will take a day." He said guess. We keep the word.
This is the kind of slow, careful work AEP is now pointing at AI.
What the Index says: AEP says the tool did most of the input work. Nobody at AEP has said how much time it saved. No measured outcome yet.
The vendor says three days, and also one. The analyst guesses one. The index will wait for AEP to count.
Seventy to Eighty Percent
At American Electric Power, a small team builds the plan for where the power will come from. The work lives in a planning workbook, and each AEP operating company has its own regulators and deadlines.