At a time when the digital technologies and sustainability are becoming more important in generating a positive impact in both society and the planet, artificial intelligence (AI) is a fundamental tool to make companies more efficient and competitive. Aware of this value, Naturgy’s strategy relies on cornerstones like digitalization and transformation with its determination to adopt advanced technologies that enable it to promote innovation, efficiency, and sustainable growth.
With this goal in mind, the energy group is promoting the use and rollout of AI in all its forms and spheres of application. “The adoption of this technology is and will keep transforming our business models, which will enable us to remain competitive and help us reach the decarbonization goals that the energy sector has pledged to pursue,” says Rafael Blesa, CIO of Naturgy.
To do so, the company has reached different alliances which help it to specify and implement its Data & Artificial Intelligence strategy alongside leading tech companies like Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, SAP, and Google. Through these strategic partnerships and a focus on the sustainable, innovative use of emerging technologies, Naturgy is pursuing a more efficient, environmentally-respectful energy model.
According to Blesa, the corporate AI strategy entails several lines of action. “It is essential to define the business goals, but it is equally important to foster knowledge and responsible use of this technology within the organization, to choose and train the right talent to manage AI, and to work with specialized providers. All of this must occur within a common framework that facilitates and expedites the development and rollout of artificial intelligence initiatives.”
To promote the adoption of artificial and generative intelligence, the energy group has created factorIA, a benchmark center that provides the framework of technological and methodological work needed to develop specific use cases that benefit the company’s different businesses. This center is grounded on three components: training, doing, and promoting.
“Training” is the component focused on educating internal talent to manage projects related to artificial intelligence through the Naturgy Corporate University as part of its Digital Academy program. Via “personIA,” the company immerses all its professionals in the tech resources, knowledge, skills, and mindset that will lead to the use and application of AI.
In turn, the “doing” component seeks to promote initiatives that facilitate the adoption and responsible and secure development of data and AI projects through different lines of action. These include encouraging the organisation to identify use cases where AI can be applied, holding concept tests that contribute to decision-making on the rollout of new technologies, generating a theoretical and methodological framework that helps identify technologies for each need, and approaching AI startups, organisations, and experts to learn about and understand market trends.
Finally, the “promoting” component consists of creating channels to disseminate the interest in data and AI among the company’s professionals, most notably the efforts of the dataHub community, which has more than 1,200 active members on staff.
Naturgy has launched an extensive list of AI-based initiatives to optimise its operations in the areas of electric grids, gas grids, sales, and renewable energies, and in this way it is leading the transformation of the energy sector.
It has several RDI projects for energy storage and batteries, digitalization of the grid, the application of drones in maintaining installations using artificial intelligence, and the implementation of advanced analytical models to define the actions that encompass the predictive maintenance tasks of the main equipment in the grid. They are called DALI (Drone & AI Line Inspection), based on the transformation of the aerial electrical line inspection process; TAIS (Telesupervision AI-based System) artificial vision algorithms; the Fire Detection device to anticipate fire detection in large forests; and the Naturgy and Fuvex projects to inspect electrical grids with long-range drones.
Other important actions are related to the application of natural language programming (NLP) to field operation processes, assessing irregularities and fraud, and advanced analytics on telemetry networks.
Likewise, it also has initiatives underway to estimate the useful life of wind turbines, image recognition for the maintenance tasks of solar farms and wind turbines, the protection of birds and other fauna, and autonomous rounds in power generation stations to detect objects via images.
Its Naturgy-MásMóvil Agreement stands out in improving customers’ experience and satisfaction: both companies have decided to team up to promote self-consumption, which also includes the development of tools supported by AI technologies to help customers through the process of deciding and contracting solar panels. Likewise, the group reached an alliance with Google Cloud in order to accelerate the digitalization of the customer area and implement attribution models based on data from that content aggregator to make its digital mix more efficient.
With the goal of providing all employees with access to the new AI tools, Naturgy is integrating AI into its operations, which enables it to promote innovation, efficiency, and sustainable growth. The company's focus on artificial intelligence is a clear sign of its commitment to work towards an integral digital transformation in which technology plays a fundamental role in the sustainable development of the energy sector.
En cuanto a la mejora de la experiencia y satisfacción del cliente, destaca el Acuerdo Naturgy-MásMóvil, en el que las dos compañías han decidido colaborar para impulsar el autoconsumo, que incluye también el desarrollo de herramientas soportadas en tecnologías de inteligencia artificial para ayudar a los clientes durante el proceso de decisión y contratación de paneles solares. Asimismo, el grupo ha realizado una alianza con Google Cloud con la finalidad de acelerar la digitalización del área de clientes e implementar modelos de atribución basados en datos del agregador de contenidos para hacer más eficiente su mix digital.
Con el propósito de facilitar el acceso a las nuevas herramientas de IA a todos los empleados, Naturgy integra la IA en sus operaciones, lo que le permite impulsar la innovación, la eficiencia y el crecimiento sostenible. La apuesta de la compañía por la inteligencia artificial es una muestra clara del compromiso de avanzar hacia una transformación digital integral en la que la tecnología desempeña un rol fundamental para el desarrollo sostenible del sector energético.
