Scott Scudder, Southern California Edison

"I wake up every morning thinking about one thing: keeping everyone safe. That's it. That's what drives me.

I work for an electric utility provider on our public safety team. My father worked for the electrical utility too—maybe it's in my blood. I spent 20 years in the Marines working on aircraft electronics, and there are certainly similarities when it comes to safety. What I do now is different, but the mission is still the same: get the work done and keep people safe. It’s a great responsibility, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

Our communities are surrounded by high-risk fire areas and the changing climate has made everything drier. This means more fuel, more risk and high consequences in the areas we serve. Every single day, 24/7, 365 days a year, we monitor weather conditions so that the electric grid will not be the cause of a wildfire. That's our calling, from the executives on down. And here's the thing: we live in these same communities, ringed in by those same high-risk fire areas too. We're not just protecting customers—we're protecting our neighbors, our families, and ourselves.

Today, thanks to AI and automation, we've transformed a lot of this work. We evaluate and analyze 15 to 20 advanced weather models, including enhanced machine learning models, that help us detect risk in areas that were historically difficult for us to evaluate before. That's a paradigm shift. We can ingest information faster and make decisions with better data on a much larger scale. What used to take our team 8 to 10 hours of manual work (figuring out which customers to notify, what to tell them, analyzing changes in weather forecasts) now takes just under an hour. This isn't just efficiency; it's the difference between customers getting advance warnings or entering a risky period without any notification.

Here's what people should understand about our journey: AI didn't replace our incident management team. Absolutely not—that’s as dangerous as it is impossible. American workers have something AI never will; an innate ability to understand consequences in ways that go far beyond data.

Instead, AI made us better at protecting lives, reducing risk, and keeping our customers and partners informed. We're risk-averse, and we must be. Having better information at our fingertips to make decisions keeps us informed of the risks that are out there. When the consequences are this great, enhanced capability means everything. It's a heavy responsibility, but we must do it, and I'm proud that American ingenuity and technology are helping us do it better. “