“Human Ingenuity & Artificial Intelligence: Reflections on a Critical Year for Infrastructure, Energy, and Collaboration” 

“This year, I’ve been fortunate to step back from the daily intensity of operational leadership and spend time immersed in two exceptional conferences: International Energy Week 2025, held in London by the Energy Institute, and the Utility Week Conference at the NEC in Birmingham.  While different in scale and focus, both forums brought together leaders from across sectors including energy, water, transport, and utilities, to grapple with the rapidly evolving demands of our industries. The most striking insight?  Despite sectoral differences, the core challenges and opportunities we face are remarkably aligned. 

Across both events, the atmosphere was marked by a sense of urgency.  Geopolitical, economic, and environmental uncertainty, is reshaping how we must plan, build, operate, and sustain national infrastructure.  We are dealing with increasingly complex capital portfolios, aging asset bases that demand more sophisticated maintenance strategies, and a growing shortage of capability and capacity within our workforces.  The pace of change is outstripping the traditional models of delivery.  A collective recognition emerged: no single actor, government, operator, OEM, or service provider, can meet this moment alone. 

There are three themes I took away that I believe deserve deep attention and broad action:

Despite the proliferation of technologies on offer, both conferences reinforced a foundational truth: our greatest breakthroughs are still driven by people.  Real progress comes not from innovation in isolation, but from collaboration, the act of coming together across traditional boundaries and working toward shared outcomes. 

One of the most powerful moments of the year for me was the interview with Maksym Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, who shared the extraordinary story of how an Ukrainian onshore windfarm was designed and built during wartime.  It wasn’t a story of perfect conditions or boundless resources, it was a story of resolve, collaboration, and national ingenuity under pressure.  Once again, necessity proved to be the mother of innovation and success. 

This echoes what we saw during the pandemic.  When urgency eclipsed bureaucracy and competition, human ingenuity flourished.  In energy, water, transport and beyond, we must now ask: how do we recreate that mindset in ‘peacetime’?  How do we embed radically collaborative behaviours into everyday delivery, not just emergency response?

Technology was, predictably, a prominent theme and yet not just as a buzzword or silver bullet there’s a growing maturity in the conversation about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.  The consensus is shifting: AI alone won’t replace human work, but humans who know how to use AI will replace those who don’t. 

Amber Russell from BP highlighted the need for Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence (HI + AI) when she spoke recently at the Reuters Downstream event, a recognition that Artificial Intelligence becomes most powerful when paired with Human Intelligence.  Scottish Water’s Nisarg Hirani at the Utility Week conference was even more direct: “It’s not AI that will take your job; it’s a human with AI.” 

This resonates deeply; across industries, we’re witnessing a rapid democratisation of tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others.  Children use them for homework.  Executives use them to brief reports yet, these tools still require context, judgment, and experience to be truly effective.  The real opportunity lies in how we combine expertise and emerging technology to tackle age-old challenges, e.g. maintenance optimisation, network resilience, decarbonisation, asset planning, and customer service. 

Generative AI, predictive analytics, and machine learning won’t do the work for us but, they will help us do the work better, faster, and with greater foresight.  The amplification of human potential is the real transformation.

Perhaps the most urgent, and often underappreciated, message was this: infrastructure resilience is now at the heart of national resilience.  The Energy Transition is about more than reaching Net Zero, crucial though that is.  It’s about building a more secure, flexible, and interoperable energy system, deeply integrated with the water, transport, digital and economic infrastructure of the nation. 

What’s underway is staggering in scale.  New offshore and onshore wind capacity.  Advanced thermal energy systems.  SMRs and next-generation nuclear.  Electrification of transport.  Hydrogen corridors.  Modernised ports and digital roads.  All of it will require expanded and upgraded transmission and distribution networks, and all of it must be monitored, controlled, maintained and defended: digitally and physically. 

This infrastructure is becoming increasingly intelligent.  Sensors, digital twins, and automated control systems generate oceans of data every second.  That data offers enormous value if we can make sense of it.  AI can help us interpret signals, identify faults, predict failures, and optimise usage, but with connectivity comes exposure.  The convergence of critical infrastructure and digital technology creates both exponential opportunity and systemic risk. 

The recent wave of global cybersecurity breaches reminds us: the more integrated and intelligent our systems become, the more vulnerable they are to disruption.  The Internet of Things is no longer a consumer trend, it’s the nervous system of a modern nation.  We must now invest not only in building new infrastructure, but in defending it.  Cyber resilience is fast becoming as important as carbon neutrality. 

Looking Forward 

The path ahead is daunting, yet the upside is profound.  We are standing at a crossroads, where leadership means being bold enough to embrace both the technical and the human.  To build trust across organisational boundaries.  To invest in new capabilities while holding fast to timeless ones: judgment, integrity, and cooperation. 

We know what’s possible.  We’ve seen it, whether in the pandemic, the windfarms of Ukraine, or the advances in asset performance delivered by AI-assisted teams.  The key lies in amplifying human ingenuity through collaboration and technology, not replacing it. 

It’s time to lead systemically, act collaboratively, and deliver relentlessly.  Infrastructure isn’t just an enabler of prosperity; it is the very foundation of it.”