Unleash Live: Founder's view

What US Utilities Are Actually Asking For Now

getstarted@unleashlive.com (Unleash Live) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Our team was in Houston last month for the 2026 Energy Drone and Robotics Summit. Four conference sessions, with four major energy providers (Duke Energy, Southern Company, Entergy and PG&E), and by the fourth one the pattern was too consistent to ignore.

The pilots are done. Nobody in that room was still proving drones work. They all operate are mature programs now, not pilots. Entergy alone is projecting 500 terabytes of inspection data by 2027, and told the room almost exactly what it wants: a way to integrate GIS mapping, metadata and workflow tools into prioritisation heat maps, so pilots can go back to pure flying instead of chasing data. Southern Company was in the same session, describing the same shift the rest of the room was living through. The conversation has moved past capture. It has landed on a harder question: what happens to all of it, and who is accountable for what it finds.

Three things stood out, and each one points to a different job that needs doing.

1. The workforce problem is the real driver, not cost

Most vendor conversations still start with ROI on the drone itself. Duke Energy's framing was different. They are looking at experienced line workers retiring over the next five to ten years, and they are treating AI as a way to hold the institutional knowledge that walks out the door with each one. That is not a cost conversation. It is a continuity one.

The answer is not faster capture. It is systems that can hold judgment that used to live in one person's head, and make it available to the person who replaces them.

2. Data paralysis has a name now

Duke described running redundant surveys because nobody fully trusted the first pass. PG&E has split piloting from analysis into two separate functions entirely. Entergy's own ask, GIS-linked prioritisation instead of raw footage, is the clearest version of the same problem. Every operator in that room wants their people out of the handling and into the judgment. Nobody wants more footage. Everybody wants fewer hours between a camera seeing something and a person deciding what to do about it.

That gap, between image and decision, is where most of the value is sitting unused right now. Closing it is an architecture problem, not a data volume problem. More storage does not fix it. A shorter path from detection to a decision a person can act on does.

3. Regulation is about to move the accountability line

FAA Part 108 shifts compliance responsibility onto the operator and opens the door to autonomous operations at scale. It means the providers who can prove governance around what their systems detect and decide will be in a different competitive position to those who can only demonstrate detection.

This is the one I would put in front of any operator right now: start documenting your model governance before the rule requires you to. Being ready before it is mandatory is worth more than being compliant after.

This is a partnership problem, not a procurement one

Drone and sensor technology has matured. None of this is any longer about who has the faster drone or the better sensor. It is about who can close the loop from image, to decision, to action, and prove that chain on request when a regulator or an auditor asks for it.

What I am confident about is this: no operator solves it alone, and no single tool solves it for them. A drone that captures beautifully, paired with a platform that has never been tested against your actual asset base and your actual failure modes, gets you nowhere near the answer. Any system is only as good as the data underneath it, and data quality is not something one piece of hardware or software guarantees on day one. It gets earned over years, in the field, against real edge cases, by whoever has been doing the unglamorous work of getting it right.

That is why this has become a partnership question rather than a procurement one. The operators actually making progress are not shopping for the single best capability on a spec sheet at the lowest price. They are choosing to build a working relationship with providers who have already been solving for exactly this, in exactly this kind of environment, long enough to have the governance and the data discipline sorted before the regulation makes it mandatory.

That is the important conversation we keep having with our clients in the harshest in-field environments.

Hanno Blankenstein is CEO and Co-founder of Unleash live, an enterprise computer vision platform. He has spent over a decade deploying AI-based visual intelligence across energy, mining, utilities and critical infrastructure.

Energy Week said eleven things. Three of them matter most.

getstarted@unleashlive.com (Unleash Live) — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Australian Energy Week wrapped up in Melbourne last week. 1,300 people. Four days. Eleven themes.

I read the outtakes. The full list is worth your time. But three of those themes stopped me. Not because they are the biggest headlines, but because they are the ones where I think the sector is underestimating what it will actually take to execute. And I work on the operational side of this problem every day, so I want to say something specific about each of them.

First: sweat the existing assets.

This theme was listed fourth. It should have been first.

When new build economics are tight, when capital is under strain and connection queues are long, the pressure to extract more from what already exists becomes the real story. And the uncomfortable truth is that most operators do not have a clear picture of what their existing assets are actually capable of. They have assumptions. They have maintenance schedules. They have inspection reports that are weeks or months old by the time decisions get made from them.

The gap between what we assume about an asset and what is actually happening on it right now is where capacity is being lost, where risk is accumulating, and where the fastest gains are sitting unclaimed.

Real-time visibility on aging infrastructure is not a nice-to-have in this environment. It is the foundation that everything else, the flexibility, the demand response, the optimised dispatch, has to be built on. You cannot optimise what you cannot see.

Second: flexibility over brute force.

DER as a system resource. Demand response instead of overbuilding. The sector is moving in the right direction here and I think it is genuinely encouraging.

But there is a precondition that the outtakes do not quite name directly: this only works if the system has dramatically better real-time information than it currently has.

Flexible demand is not manageable in the abstract. It requires knowing, at any given moment, what is happening across a distributed asset base. What is online. What is at risk. What has capacity to flex and what does not. That level of operational visibility is not something most networks have today. The ambition is real. The instrumentation required to deliver on it is still being built.

I see this in practice. The organisations that are furthest ahead on flexibility are the ones that invested earliest in understanding their assets at a granular level. Not through periodic inspection. Through continuous, live intelligence. The ones that are struggling are often trying to manage flexible resources with information that is simply too slow and too sparse to act on.

Third: transmission as a choke point.

Planning delays. Cost blowouts. Community opposition. The outtakes are right that this is the constraint everything else waits on.

What I would add is that part of the transmission problem is a visibility problem. Decisions about where to invest, what to upgrade, what can be deferred, are being made on data that does not reflect the current state of the network with enough precision or frequency. Condition monitoring on transmission assets is still far less mature than it should be given how much is riding on those assets performing.

The projects that are stalled in planning are a separate problem. But for the assets that are already in the ground, there is meaningful capacity being left on the table because operators do not have a reliable, continuous picture of what those assets can safely carry. Better instrumentation does not solve the planning delay. It does, however, change the economics of what is already there.

The other eight themes matter. Demand growth, battery integration, capital constraints, regulatory reform, the data centre question. These are real and they deserve serious attention.

But if I am honest about where the operational gap is largest right now, it is in these three. The sector has the plans. It has the intent. What it needs is the ground-level intelligence to execute with confidence.

That is a solvable problem. And it is one worth talking about plainly.

About the Author: Founder and CEO, Hanno Blankenstein

Hanno Blankenstein is the CEO and Co-founder of Unleash live, an enterprise computer vision platform deployed globally across energy, mining and critical infrastructure. He serves as a Non-Executive Director of the German-Australian Chamber of Industry and Commerce and contributes to the CSIRO National AI Centre's AI at Scale Think Tank. Prior to founding his current venture, Hanno was Partner and Managing Director of BCG Digital Ventures in Asia and joint CEO of design firm S&C, acquired by The Boston Consulting Group in 2014. He has held senior roles at Vodafone Australia and PwC Strategy&, and has incubated and scaled digital businesses internationally for over a decade.