Visual Intelligence in Power Grids: From Emerging Technology to Operating Mandate Author Sticky GE Vernova GE Vernova Inc. (NYSE: GEV) is a purpose-built global energy company that includes Power, Wind, and Electrification segments and is supported by its accelerator businesses. Building on over 130 years of experience tackling the world’s challenges, GE Vernova is uniquely positioned to help lead the energy transition by continuing to electrify the world while simultaneously working to decarbonize it. GE Vernova helps customers power economies and deliver electricity that is vital to health, safety, security, and improved quality of life. GE Vernova is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., with approximately 75,000 employees across 100+ countries around the world. Supported by the Company’s purpose, The Energy to Change the World, GE Vernova technology helps deliver a more affordable, reliable, sustainable, and secure energy future.GE Vernova’s Electrification Software business is focused on delivering the intelligent applications and insights needed to accelerate electrification and decarbonization across the entire energy ecosystem – from how it’s created, how it’s orchestrated, to how it’s consumed. Jun 30, 2026 Last Updated 10 Minutes read Share Utility infrastructure, including assets such as transmission towers, distribution poles, conductors, and rights-of-way sprawl thousands of miles, and, therefore, the inspection cycles might span multiple years, with only a fraction of the assets may get reviewed in any given year.For decades, the inspection process has relied on manual surveys, paper-based workflows, and the judgment of field crews working from what they could physically perceive.This model is operating against a set of strategic stakes, which continue to gain urgency. For example, wildfire risk in the western United States has turned vegetation management from a cost-control exercise into a public safety obligation. More frequent and severe storms have done the same for asset inspection in the east. In tandem, regulators, communities, and customers are demanding faster, more transparent evidence of grid reliability. Vegetation and asset as existential risks: foundation for future investments For most of the past decade, vegetation management and asset inspection sat firmly in the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) cost bucket as necessary expenditures, to be managed carefully and deferred when budget pressure mounted.In recent years, that framing has changed structurally.Growing wildfire risks have turned vegetation management into a liability exposure and regulatory obligation for utilities. For instance, a single-phase rural line that was historically a low priority shifts to a higher risk category when the land around it has dried out, fuel load has increased, and the surrounding population has grown. "What were once considered sort of an O&M drain on the business are now being the same programs or being the foundation for future investment to make safer and reliable operating conditions, primarily here in the United States, subject to existential threats around wildfire in the western part of the country, as well as severe, more frequent and severe storms in the eastern part of the country."Brent BolzeniusMarket Specialist, Visual Intelligence, GE Vernova Utilities are operating on a fraction of their own data One of the most striking structural challenges facing utilities stems from ineffective use of grid data. Most notably, inspection records, outage logs, GIS systems, and vegetation databases have grown substantially over the past decade; however, most of this data is collected once and never used again. "Some of you have heard me talking about the dark data problem utilities are having, and I always talk about 80% of data, meaning data that utilities have somewhat, but they cannot use it. They cannot access it. You would even say it's 95%."Thorsten HellerHead of Innovation, Grid Software, GE Vernova This is where recent AI advances matter most crucially, making it possible to extract operationally relevant insights from petabytes of imagery and LiDAR at a speed and accuracy that wasn't feasible before.As stated by Brent, "I think only 5% of the information within an enterprise is ever utilized more than once. And so that's a huge opportunity to leverage existing information, whether that's in the vegetation program, the asset inspection programs or other aspects of operations. There's a ton now that the use of AI can leverage what a single person could be able to do and discover valuable insight into those petabytes of information."GridOS® Visual Intelligence, through its use of 3D visual data, AI-enabled analytics, and shared geospatial platforms, allows utilities to monitor and manage grid assets more effectively. Here’s how: A 3D operating baseline for grid infrastructure At its core, Visual Intelligence builds a shared 3D baseline of a utility's network, including poles, conductors, rights-of-way, and all the vegetation and assets surrounding them. On top of that baseline, field crews, contractors, trimming companies, and engineering teams can run any type of analytics or request to identify risks and threats across the network from a single shared view.The utility can query the platform to determine vital insights such as where trees are projected to encroach on conductors over the next six months, how many insulators sit on a given circuit, or whether a specific pole shows signs of rust; these questions previously necessitated physical inspection or remained fully or partially unanswered. "Imagine you can build like a kind of a Google Earth type of view of your electric grid, of your poles, of your conductors, of everything surrounding those poles and those conductors. So having like a shared view like this that you can share among all the employees within your companies, with your contractors, with your trimming companies, with your maintenance service providers."Benjamin BenharroshSr. Director, Visual Intelligence, GE Vernova GridOS Visual Intelligence ingests a variety of visual data such as drone imagery, satellite captures, aerial LiDAR, vehicle-mounted sensors, or smartphones. It then builds the 3D replica of the asset and applies AI to assign semantic meaning to what it sees. AI-enabled visual intelligence: turning raw visual data into prioritized field work The AI pipeline in Visual Intelligence operates in layered stages, starting with Ingestion where large-scale deployments process petabytes of visual data per collection cycle. In the Classification stage, AI assigns semantic meaning to every pixel and 3D point, identifying poles, conductors, trees, and ground features automatically.Once objects are classified and vectorized, geometry takes over. The distance between a tree and a conductor is a straightforward calculation once both objects are correctly labeled. What AI enables is the upstream work that makes that calculation possible at scale.The final stage is Prediction. Where utilities have accumulated time-series data across multiple collection cycles, models can forecast vegetation risk months in advance by projecting growth rates and predicting when a tree will enter the clearance zone. The "inflection point" for grid assets Visual Intelligence, integrated within the broader GridOS platform, is not a point solution for vegetation or asset inspection teams. It is a data layer that connects field-captured visual data to GIS, work order management, risk modelling, and regulatory reporting. Utilities that treat it as such will see compound returns as integrations deepen and AI models train on more historical data. "And so today is that inflection point for what five years from now looks like. And it's a bright future, and the possibilities are unlimited," said Brent.The utilities that reach that future strongest are the ones that treat this cycle as the moment to start.Ready to see Visual Intelligence in action? Contact the GE Vernova Grid Software team to request a demo or learn more about how Visual Intelligence can work for your network. Author Section Author GE Vernova GE Vernova Inc. (NYSE: GEV) is a purpose-built global energy company that includes Power, Wind, and Electrification segments and is supported by its accelerator businesses. Building on over 130 years of experience tackling the world’s challenges, GE Vernova is uniquely positioned to help lead the energy transition by continuing to electrify the world while simultaneously working to decarbonize it. GE Vernova helps customers power economies and deliver electricity that is vital to health, safety, security, and improved quality of life. GE Vernova is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., with approximately 75,000 employees across 100+ countries around the world. Supported by the Company’s purpose, The Energy to Change the World, GE Vernova technology helps deliver a more affordable, reliable, sustainable, and secure energy future.GE Vernova’s Electrification Software business is focused on delivering the intelligent applications and insights needed to accelerate electrification and decarbonization across the entire energy ecosystem – from how it’s created, how it’s orchestrated, to how it’s consumed.