3 Reflections from the Floor of Orchestrate 2025

Every year I look forward to attending Orchestrate, GE Vernova’s Grid Software customer conference increasingly focused on GridOS® and the innovation needed to achieve grid orchestration. It’s always exciting and insightful to reconnect with customers, partners, and product experts and learn about their lessons and achievements over the past year.

And this year was no exception. It was our first international Orchestrate, with more than 800 attendees from all over the world. They brought with them unique perspectives, challenges, best practices, and advice for us and their peers. It was truly fascinating to see people with such diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and responsibilities network and share their experiences with peers.

Here are just three of the things I learned from Orchestrate 2025:

AI was a prevalent topic at Orchestrate, especially its impact on people. This is hardly surprising, given the numerous articles in the media about how AI is replacing jobs across industries.

In the utility industry, AI offers so much opportunity. At GE Vernova Grid Software, we are developing our AI-ready solutions not to replace people, but augment them. For example, we previewed our GridOS Virtual Operator concept along with a new generation of AI/ML applications and received some great feedback from our customers and partners.

AI serves an undeniably crucial role in modern grid operations. Decisions must be made in near-real time – faster and more frequently than any human is capable of. A perfect example of this is voltage management. DER-heavy grids must issue scores or even hundreds of voltage corrections per day. It is not efficient for a control room operator to simply sit and wait for these voltage fluctuations to occur and take remedial action. This is why many utilities are working to automate the voltage management process.

Within GridOS Advanced Energy Management Systems, Advanced Distribution Management System, and Distributed Energy Resources Management System, for example, voltage fluctuations on the transmission and distribution grids are automatically detected, analyzed, and corrected by sending predetermined commands to the relevant equipment, dictating next steps to restore proper voltage. Thus, the control room operator is freed from this mundane task and may be reassigned to work on higher-value tasks.

It’s also important to remember AI’s role in closing the utility space’s growing knowledge gap. Utility professionals are retiring at an alarming rate – and taking their institutional knowledge with them. By implementing AI to help analyze data and guide decision-making, utilities can begin to close the knowledge gap and make it easier for newer employees to learn the ropes. AI may generate questions for some, but it is clear that without it, the utility industry’s challenges will only continue.

Recent wildfires that spread into Lahaina, Hawaii and the heart of Los Angeles, California were an eye-opener for utilities. The sight of urban areas in flames has raised new concerns about the destructive potential of wildfires and how to identify their risk factors in advance. This was evident at Orchestrate, where numerous sessions and discussions touched upon identifying and mitigating wildfire risk.

This is an area in which GridOS Visual Intelligence can be helpful. Visual Intelligence is perhaps best known for its role in utility vegetation management, for which it overlays network maps and vegetation scans to flag the precise locations where trees and shrubbery pose a risk to infrastructure. Naturally, this makes it ideal for identifying and removing dead vegetation that could fuel a wildfire. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Utilities are increasingly leveraging Visual Intelligence to identify opportunities for proactive asset maintenance which, if left unresolved, could spark a fire. Examples include unstable utility poles, cracks or corrosion on metal transmission towers, or even old lines that are beginning to fray and spark. Visual Intelligence can be used to identify and flag concerns, unlocking proactive maintenance – ideally long before wildfire season begins.

There is no debate that advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) data is invaluable for grid operations. There is, however, significant debate about the best way to integrate and harness that data. Many Orchestrate attendees shared their challenges putting AMI data to good use. The integration process can be streamlined with the help of GridOS partners like Itron, but leveraging it within their operations presents another hurdle.

Thus it was not surprising that Icelandic utility Veitur’s session on leveraging AMI data was especially well-attended. Veitur’s Head of Grid Architecture and Innovation, Ivar Hrafn Agustsson, explained to a captivated audience how Veitur saw AMI data as key to achieving full LV situational awareness during outage situations, enabling them to both accurately map outage areas and pinpoint fault locations. They leveraged GridOS Connect, the data-integration layer of GridOS Data Fabric to make it easier to unite disparate AMI, GIS, and customer data, which turned out to be a smashing success. Now, instead of relying on customer calls to determine the extent of outages and subsequent recovery efforts, Veitur can proactively achieve these insights by examining smart meter indicators, or “events.”

There are three types of smart meter events that are used in the outage management and recovery processes:

This is an ongoing project for Veitur, as more smart meters are connected and Veitur upgrades to the latest versions of GridOS ADMS . We look forward to hearing of continued successes from Veitur’s integration of AMI data in its disruption recovery efforts.

For more information on GridOS, check out our ebook on the subject. And if you are a customer, be sure to watch for an invite in early 2026 to attend next year’s Orchestrate.