The Digital Economy is Driving, and Demanding, Innovation in the Utilities Sector
Michael O’Donnell, National Vice President of SAP, is DataVisor’s guest on “Unsupervised: Candid Talks with Visionary Thinkers.”
One need only look at his Twitter bio to get a clear understanding of where Michael O’Donnell stands when it comes to technology:
“Firm believer in the power of technology to improve people’s lives.”
Michael O’Donnell is the National Vice President of SAP, and he has been with the organization for two decades. His primary focus today is on Utilities, and it’s an arena he sees as being ripe for innovation — of necessity. He shares his thoughts in a recent CIO opinion piece titled “Why (and how) Utilities See a Future in the Cloud”:
“An industry that has enjoyed its monopoly status for decades now lags behind other sectors in the US that have adopted top-to-bottom technology platforms. Thanks to increased competition, utilities, like every other industry, are now being impacted by rapidly shifting customer needs and expectations and, as a result, have gone from crawling to walking toward digitization to keep up.”
He concludes his article by speaking to the importance of data-intensive innovation, noting that without it, “effectively competing for consumer loyalty and business is nothing more than a pipe dream.”
It is because of Michael’s nuanced and future-facing understanding of how our digital economy is both driving and demanding innovation across industries that we were so excited to welcome him as a guest on “Unsupervised: Candid Talks with Visionary Thinkers,” DataVisor’s talk series, hosted by CEO and Co-Founder Yinglian Xie.
Over the course of their conversation, Michael and Yinglian address the challenges traditional sectors — particularly heavily regulated ones such as the utilities industry — face in trying to adapt to the modern digital economy.
Michael points out that a rising tide of technologically advanced fraud is putting the pressure on, because currently, fraudsters are already using technologies like AI and machine learning, and it’s giving them an advantage:
“This allows the other side of this equation — the people that are trying to do harm to the utility — to do so at a much higher volume. However, it’s not that easy for these utilities to manage this with less automated processes, and without the same technologies. So, they now need to look at those same things, like AI and ML, and figure out exactly how they leverage those solutions to combat what they’re now facing.”
Michael draws on deep domain experience to make these observations; at one point during the talk, he cites the example of one utility — one he works with, and is in the control center for — that is being hit “hundreds of thousands of times an hour” by attackers trying to get into their network.
As Michael states, this is an unprecedented increase in pressure. Fortunately, he says, “the solutions are there.”
In discussing the rising importance of AI and machine learning-powered solutions, Michael and Yinglian tackle some of the obstacles still in the way of full-scale implementation, including the long-standing concern that AI and automation will put human workers out of jobs.
You can watch the full episode below, but to give you a sense of Michael’s take on the future of work, he first posed this question …
“How do we create work that is meaningful and purposeful, but also take advantage of these technologies that will enable people to do better and more sophisticated work?”
… and then answered it in this way:
“The reality is, with every innovation, there’s always more work to do, rather than less.”
Watch “Unsupervised: Candid Talks with Visionary Thinkers” with special guest Michael O’Donnell, National Vice President of SAP, today!
