Insider's Guide to Energy
The Energy Industry is uniquely evolving as traders are under increasing pressure to manage costs, cash, limits, and risks. The Insider’s Guide to Energy Podcast addresses current and emerging challenges business executives face daily through stories shared from peers and industry experts while covering topics such as innovation, disruptive technologies, and emerging trends.
Insider's Guide to Energy
197 - AI in Energy: Practical Insights on Leveraging AI for Utility and Energy Sectors
This episode of the Insider’s Guide to Energy podcast delves into the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the energy sector. Hosts Chris Sass and Jeff McAulay are joined by Ray Rasmussen, Managing Partner at rGen Consulting, to explore how AI is revolutionizing energy companies, from streamlining operations to enhancing decision-making. Rasmussen shares his insights on how businesses can effectively harness AI, focusing on its ability to provide actionable intelligence and improve processes like grid management and compliance.
Rasmussen emphasizes the importance of starting with no-regrets projects that allow companies to build internal AI capabilities while minimizing risk. He discusses practical applications, such as using AI to optimize document management, digitize unstructured data, and create predictive models for energy grid maintenance. These early steps, he argues, help companies build a foundation that positions them for future AI advancements.
Looking ahead, the conversation touches on the potential of AI to drive significant innovation in areas like electric vehicle infrastructure planning, compliance, and disaster recovery. Rasmussen offers a clear roadmap for energy companies eager to embrace AI, stressing the importance of taking manageable, incremental steps to ensure long-term success in this evolving technological landscape.
We were pleased to host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rayrasmussen/
Visit our website: https://insidersguidetoenergy.com/
Transcript
00:00:03 Chris Sass
Your trusted source for information on the energy transition. This is the Insider's Guide to Energy podcast.
00:00:15 Chris Sass
Welcome to another edition of the Insider’s Guide to Energy Podcast. I'm your host Chris Sass, and with me as co-host Jeff McAulay. Jeff, how you doing today?
00:00:22 Jeff McAulay
Great. Chris excited about our favorite topic.
00:00:26 Chris Sass
We're back on a I I think you know it was worth bringing in somebody that's playing in this space to kind of help our audience understand the the journey of where you go and how to get there. And that's why I'm hoping we can do that. I know we'll achieve that, but that's my goal today. Do you have any expectations yourself?
00:00:44 Jeff McAulay
Gosh, I'm thinking that we talk a lot about the high flying dreams of what you can do with AI and maybe we need some more concrete ways to help get.
00:00:56 Chris Sass
OK, you'd be the optimist. Today. I'll be the pessimist today and we will kick off with us today. Is Ray Ross. Newton ray. Welcome, musson. I'm sorry, Ray. Welcome to the program today.
00:01:08 Ray Rasmussen
It's a pleasure to be here.
00:01:10 Chris Sass
So you heard my expectation. You heard Jeff's expectation. Why do we start a little bit about who you are? You work for a consulting firm, just very briefly, what firm do you work for and what do you do?
00:01:23 Ray Rasmussen
Well, I'm the managing partner at rGen Consulting and and if I had to kind of characterize this, I would say we're on the business side of artificial intelligence. We practice primarily with energy and technology companies and we help them find, you know, meaningful ways to take a variety of tools including artificial intelligence and make.
00:01:43 Ray Rasmussen
The most out of those?
00:01:44 Chris Sass
All right, we're.
00:01:45 Chris Sass
Going to focus on artificial intelligence today, I always think it's fair. I've been doing talks on AI now for several years in the industry to define what we mean by AI. Let's let's just set the ground rules before we dive into this conversation and get into all the magic.
00:02:02 Ray Rasmussen
You want me to define artificial intelligence?
00:02:03 Chris Sass
Absolutely, because you're going to give us some examples. So I want to know what you think AI is.
00:02:08 Ray Rasmussen
Well, I don't think I've ever been posed that question, so forgive me for formulating an answer, but the artificial intelligence as we see it is is a way to stop in some cases. I'll give you examples instead of search.
00:02:23 Ray Rasmussen
Getting an answer, so if you a typical search will give you a range of things to look at and and go explore. Whereas I think artificial intelligence tends to give you the answer and the power in artificial intelligence and the one that we hope to talk a little bit about today is focusing that in such a way your people get the answers they really need at the time they need it.
00:02:42 Ray Rasmussen
So that's kind of the.
00:02:44 Ray Rasmussen
People's meat and potatoes of this. Beyond that, there's artificial intelligence that does a number of other things. You know, there's, you know, machine learning as an example. And there's also the kind of thing that goes into creating, you know, graphics and, you know, videos and so forth. But I think principally today we're going to talk about it more from an information and a presentation of that information point of view.
00:03:05 Chris Sass
And now if I take that and abstract that out and and overlay, let's say renewable energy, where does this? Where does the intersection between the two go for, let's say an energy or utility from from the description of finding, you know easier questions answered.
00:03:21 Ray Rasmussen
Well, I think.
00:03:21 Ray Rasmussen
The real thing we talked about the shift in renewables, for example, and the, you know, there's continued consumption of course of of all petroleum products and the the growth of energy and the impacts of legislation. All of these things simply amount to increasing demand whether you're a renewable or whether you're a traditional.
00:03:40 Ray Rasmussen
Generation Company, or if you're a combination.
00:03:44 Ray Rasmussen
Things all of these things are creating intense pressure on energy companies to find ways to get things done. And if we have time, we can talk a little bit about things that are going on in the, you know, legislative and regulatory space. All of these things add up. And so the real opportunity for artificial intelligence is certainly around some operational.
00:04:04 Ray Rasmussen
So we can talk about grid management, for example.
00:04:07 Ray Rasmussen
But what I thought would be as greatest interest to this audience is finding the on ramp, the place that you could get started and take advantage of artificial intelligence immediately in such a way that you build a team within your organization that has the kind of capabilities that you need long term to take advantage of some of that very exciting.
00:04:27 Ray Rasmussen
Future that.
00:04:28 Ray Rasmussen
Potentially you talked with others about.
00:04:32 Jeff McAulay
And Ray, it sounds like you're talking about the enterprise and you're talking about functions that are largely what used to be the domain of the intranet, right? All of these proprietary documents within a company that are supposed to be searchable. And I don't know, I would just say from my experience in corporate environment, never quite worked to get the answer that you actually want, so.
00:04:51 Jeff McAulay
I've heard that called different things resource augmented generation or rag or sort of internal. Basically not just searchable, but getting the answers out of internally held.
00:05:01 Jeff McAulay
Documents two questions come to mind there. One, how do you actually get the internal documents into a system where you can get those answers and then everybody wants to know about hallucinations and all that stuff? How do you get to a point where you can actually trust the answers that come out of that system?
00:05:18 Ray Rasmussen
I think that's an insightful question. You know, we used to joke about that. We we used to call those internal systems, right once we never and what we meant by that was or warn if you want what we meant by that is you put all the stuff away and you can never find it. The you know that most of these companies are very dutiful about.
00:05:38 Ray Rasmussen
Capturing information, they're pretty good about.
00:05:40 Ray Rasmussen
But really revealing the value in that information is something that's eluded them, so we make a joke also between the difference between search and find.
00:05:49 Ray Rasmussen
You know we search.
00:05:50 Ray Rasmussen
All the time for the information we need, we rarely find it. Artificial intelligence allows you to kind of change the whole dynamic to even a conversation between you and the information you're.
00:06:00 Ray Rasmussen
You're searching.
00:06:01 Ray Rasmussen
So what we have is some examples, and there's a there's a detailed example if you want, we can.
00:06:07 Ray Rasmussen
Get into it talks.
00:06:09 Ray Rasmussen
A little bit about an on ramp in the beginning using artificial technology, artificial intelligence technologies in a way that.
00:06:16 Ray Rasmussen
Builds on the information you already have. The infrastructure already have and begins to build momentum within your team, so that's I think it's an insightful question. It's for years I think people have searched, we offer artificial intelligence as a way to actually find answers.
00:06:33 Jeff McAulay
And people are also wondering, well, how do I know that my documents are secure? There's been some horror stories out there of people just dropping confidential information into.
00:06:42 Jeff McAulay
The you know open AI's ChatGPT, which has kind of this hilarious disclaimer of like, yeah, your stuff is secure, but we can make mistakes. So what kind of platforms are you working with? How does that trust get established such that the enterprise customer can work?
00:06:59 Jeff McAulay
With these tools.
00:07:01 Ray Rasmussen
You know, we work almost exclusively with the Microsoft folks for that very reason. You know, they they're, you know, DoD certified and.
00:07:09 Ray Rasmussen
So forth, so they.
00:07:10 Ray Rasmussen
They do a lot of things.
00:07:11 Ray Rasmussen
In there, just a regular infrastructure that makes them pretty secure, and they have a.
00:07:15 Ray Rasmussen
Lot of things on top of.
00:07:16 Ray Rasmussen
That, but I think you're right about it. What you don't want to do is just wire the thing up to ChatGPT.
00:07:21 Ray Rasmussen
And and hope for the.
00:07:23 Ray Rasmussen
Best and even small energy companies that we work with have told us that they've been attacked by.
00:07:31 Ray Rasmussen
By bad actors and and so that concern is not one of.
00:07:36 Ray Rasmussen
Of you know, maybe the future, or maybe even the maybes. It's a it's a reality. These energy companies are confronting every day, so we take great pains to make sure that we start with stuff that's very secure and environments that are already within the domain of the energy companies we work with and most often.
00:07:56 Ray Rasmussen
That starts with SharePoint. SharePoint is a pretty good place that people put a lot of files and information and now we can talk about using artificial intelligence to.
00:08:03 Ray Rasmussen
Give them better access to that.
00:08:08 Jeff McAulay
OK, great. So SharePoint, the other thing that a lot of people have heard about and are probably groaning and maybe this is like, oh, great. I'm I'm being sold SharePoint again, but this time it's different. So what what's really different here, right? And and maybe it is significant because Microsoft has come out with some pretty big announcements.
00:08:27 Jeff McAulay
Just in the last couple of weeks, I'm sure a lot of those, yeah, technology companies that we're launching features are just going to get rolled over by the normal Microsoft release. So you know, should we be optimal? Is this the time to to revisit SharePoint? And no, no, no, trust me, it's it's a lot better this time.
00:08:45 Ray Rasmussen
Well, I don't think it's ever been, you know, it's got an interface that only a mother can love.
00:08:49 Ray Rasmussen
So I think.
00:08:50 Ray Rasmussen
There's there's something there to be said for SharePoint, but in terms of security, which is where we started this conversation, I think it's a good place to be. Secondly, we can put the things on top of it that really offer you the kind of insight and access that you want and and do it in such a way that people can really.
00:09:06 Ray Rasmussen
The problem is not getting information in. The problem is getting the right information out, so that's where I I focus a little bit of the the time and attention. So and and then there are some things you know. I get it that you know SharePoint in its native form is pretty unattractive, but that is something that.
00:09:22 Ray Rasmussen
Is correctable, but I think the central point, the one that I've I've emphasized, is the one you made there at the end. Microsoft has thousands of engineers focused on this. It's not just the copilot wave 2 that you mentioned that was announced about two weeks ago. That's not the only thing they have thousands of engineers dedicated to this. They work 24 hours a day.
00:09:43 Ray Rasmussen
Around the clock with engineering teams in the United States and elsewhere working to refine copilot. As you know, I I was. I worked in provided.
00:09:56 Ray Rasmussen
Business application strategy to Microsoft in one of my checkered past careers and I have some insight and just to the volume of work effort and I think it's a good pony to bet on. So the way to look at this is not who is ahead by a nose. I don't think that's an interesting question. I think there are two better questions.
00:10:16 Ray Rasmussen
The question might be who's going to be on this race next year and where? Where are ponies going to be placed two years, five years from now?
00:10:25 Chris Sass
So you talked about SharePoint, you've talked about some kind of common tools in the infrastructure.
00:10:34 Chris Sass
How are we overlaying that into an AI solution that's bringing value to the Business Today, right. We we want to get the data out. That's what you're talking about. You're saying, hey, look, there's some data in here I want to get some historic data or be able to understand and ask questions on the data. So maybe just paint the picture of what this looks like when it's all put together.
00:10:53 Ray Rasmussen
That's really, you know, and I'm happy to share this with your with your subscribers is we have a schematic that we've offered that tells people here's how in this one case though, the real example I sent to you is the fork document management component schematic and what it does is it builds on things that you're likely to have.
00:11:13 Ray Rasmussen
Already in your infrastructure, certainly SharePoint is among them, but the other ones are, you know, power automate and power apps on top of all of that and and some power BI as well to get use to the point where you can put stuff in the example.
00:11:29 Ray Rasmussen
The site is one of our clients had a huge backlog of maintenance records that are in generation. They have these units were installed as as long ago as the 1930s. There's been a huge amount of maintenance done on them. And so just getting that stuff handwritten notes at the OCR and so forth was a big task.
00:11:50 Ray Rasmussen
But now providing access is where artificial intelligence really comes in. Someone who's going to do maintenance can ask questions about that generation unit and learn information that they would could gather very quickly in a conversation.
00:12:04 Ray Rasmussen
Relation with the artificial intelligence that might take them many, many hours just sorting through many documents, even if they had been, you know, completely OCR and everything.
00:12:18 Jeff McAulay
Great. So Ray, you're describing a the the final realization of a once promised future of Internet and and OCR, I mean OCR has been around for for decades. And I think if I'm summarizing your pitches, but no, no, no, it finally does what we said it would do now.
00:12:30 Ray Rasmussen
For sure.
00:12:37 Jeff McAulay
And you can get.
00:12:39 Jeff McAulay
You know, answers to your questions you can find not just search. So I would put that in the category of the the vegetable eating of corporate Internet Intranet document management. So this is good in that you're providing an on ramp, but it's not transformational or surprising or revolutionary.
00:12:59 Jeff McAulay
It's a surprise you don't. You don't need anything fancy. Just sign up with Microsoft, Figure out how to write some real AI power BI on top of it. And that's, you know, basically eating your vegetables. What does the organization get for those who might want a little bit more? What is? What's the dessert?
00:13:19 Ray Rasmussen
Well, I think there's that. I think that is a good way to put it. The on ramp is a good way to express that, but many, many energy companies are looking for is a no regrets approach. Something allows them to make a an investment that starts to build the skills and capabilities in their team.
00:13:39 Ray Rasmussen
In such a way that they can take on something more magnified.
00:13:43 Ray Rasmussen
You know, if you look at some work that was done by Siemens and stuff like that, that's it's unbelievably interesting. And there's other examples that we could talk about what these people have in common are thousands of engineers that they can apply to the problem. For most energy companies and most utilities, for example, are not going to have the same access. But that does not mean you should.
00:14:04 Ray Rasmussen
Outsourcing our opinion is, is that you should be building these skills step wise and.
00:14:09 Ray Rasmussen
If you do that.
00:14:10 Ray Rasmussen
It it's a little I made it sound a little easier than it is so that that the thing that we just described includes some stuff and a tool called syntax as an example. And we had to augment that with Azure AI tools as well in order to do something that's really workable. So it's still a little bit of, you know, turning the crank to get it to all work, but it is possible and it's possible within usually the skill set.
00:14:35 Ray Rasmussen
Of the team that you feel already without outsourcing this whole thing to somebody else or taking on something so ambitious that it's not realistic.
00:14:43 Ray Rasmussen
But to answer your question, the future of this is.
00:14:50 Ray Rasmussen
I'm just looking is is very for example the one that you know people might want to look at is using large language models to assist with compliance and to to review. Federal permitting I mean.
00:15:05 Ray Rasmussen
Honestly, that's just a that's just heartache and grief. And if you could get something to help you to point you in the direction to help you with the stepwise kind of understanding both what you must do and to assemble the information required, it can. It can mean a dramatic reduction in the amount of.
00:15:21 Ray Rasmussen
Work effort around something like that.
00:15:27 Ray Rasmussen
We're looking for more examples, Jeff.
00:15:30 Jeff McAulay
If we think about around the corner, everybody's talking about agents. So LM is where we are in the last two years. We're getting the information that's in there that's needed. I hear about custom trained models. So building LM's based on internal documents.
00:15:36
MHM.
00:15:50 Jeff McAulay
But also not just getting the answer but.
00:15:53 Jeff McAulay
Having an agent that does the searching, where are we on the agentic AI journey, in your opinion?
00:16:01 Ray Rasmussen
Well, you know, I think that you were making a little bit of a joke about, you know, we've had OCR for a while. You just telling me it works now and this is a RP A, this is robotic process automation and that's what agentic is. And so if you look up, you know that there's been nice folks in that business for a long time.
00:16:20 Ray Rasmussen
I guess this being an example of that and may allow you to automate all kinds of things. What what the combination of RP A if you want to call it that or the agentic and the traditional AI.
00:16:33 Ray Rasmussen
Is it can react to triggers of one sort or another, so a a trigger occurs and now you can make an intelligent action based on that and so that's what agentic is all about. So I might use Jeff your your example of OCR finally I can get information I really need that's also too.
00:16:53 Ray Rasmussen
What we're seeing?
00:16:54 Ray Rasmussen
With Agentic now our experience with that stuff has been.
00:17:00 Ray Rasmussen
A little bit. We find three things. It's not high volume and it it it there's it breaks a little bit when we're trying to use it. So we're having some problems there and then the support hasn't been entirely as good as we need across a couple of different vendors and what's going on there.
00:17:19 Ray Rasmussen
Is the things are maturing. Of course. That's why they break a little bit and then a lack of support is just, you know, it just takes time for everybody to come up to speed. So if you choose to use a gentech, it's can be very exciting and there's some things that you can do, certainly automating based on, you know, artificial intelligence, you know, use that information to, you know, alert folks or send an e-mail or do some other things.
00:17:41 Ray Rasmussen
But it's a close cousin to what RP A is, which is, you know, going to be working.
00:17:45 Ray Rasmussen
On structured data.
00:17:48 Chris Sass
So we talked about unstructured data a bit right in the energy business where we have unstructured data. Our P has been around a long time. You and I talked to in the last week or week before and I said, hey, I remember we were watching a few utilities, you know do RP A and and that was an incremental step for them a while ago, right? That was just kind of workflow kind of process that they.
00:18:08 Chris Sass
They could manage.
00:18:10 Chris Sass
I think the the panacea that we're looking for is actionable intelligence that I can pull out of the data that I can't do, right. So you take a data set, you know, Internet of Things, you've got a lot of devices, just too much information for our human to make an intelligent decision. Computers do this really well and it gives me some advice back or you you talked about you know.
00:18:29 Chris Sass
Work regulations and I think Jeff was talking about 3 Mile Island coming online and saying look in order to do that there's there's millions of things you have to read and understand and and get together in order to see if you can get this back online.
00:18:42 Chris Sass
Computers might be better served than humans for that. Are you seeing that? And then what specifically applications are you seeing that in?
00:18:50 Ray Rasmussen
Well, IoT is.
00:18:52 Ray Rasmussen
A pretty good example of where you've.
00:18:54 Ray Rasmussen
Got a lot of.
00:18:55 Ray Rasmussen
What a lot of opportunity, because fairly it's fairly structured data. The problem is, is that IoT devices tend to be all over on the map in terms of what they send back. So you know you've got devices manufactured by all kinds of different people and and and at different points.
00:19:09
Yeah, but I'm.
00:19:10 Chris Sass
Talking like smart meters or, you know, things, things inside the space that that we're playing specifically in, right, so.
00:19:17 Chris Sass
They're they're a little tighter, are they not?
00:19:19 Ray Rasmussen
Well, they are. My point was because it because the data is fairly clean, it is actually a very good place to be looking because one of the problems that people have are you know what they might call a hallucination. But really it's just an accuracy and the data is principally the problem. The nice thing about the things that you were talking about there, Chris, this is IoT devices are throwing off information.
00:19:41 Ray Rasmussen
That you can pretty much count on, and so it's it's structured and it might be structured in different ways and This is why artificial intelligence is a is a good place to to start because it very rapidly can understand information coming at it from various.
00:19:55 Ray Rasmussen
Places and normalize it. Rationalize and make some sense out of it for you. So if those the IoT devices is a particularly good one because the quality of the data that tends to come from them, does that make sense?
00:20:06 Chris Sass
It does. So the next thing that comes to mind when I talk to energy and utility companies and and they're looking so many folks just want to find an AI project to get experience, they they may not necessarily need it, but they're dying to have their leadership wants them to do it or they want this on their resume.
00:20:23 Chris Sass
And so they're starting with you. You talked about OCR and and and I would say OCR is dated, but they're they're talking about digitizing unstructured data, right and and getting information in from that structured that seems to be where we were today. What are we on the cusp of next? Because I I think that's the one dot O project, right. I think I've seen people for the last year.
00:20:45 Chris Sass
Going all in, there's a number of companies trying to do that. There's a lot of folks like yourselves that are helping people do that in house and bring the skills in to build that. But where does that go? So now I've got my unstructured data in some sort of format. What do I do next?
00:20:59 Ray Rasmussen
Well, I think it's fairly good at looking at that. I mean, if I was going to pick one that I think is not actually in the future that people are maybe doing even now it's it's building grid models, taking information and looking at capacity and transmission studies and taking all of that information and trying to use that as a way to think a little bit about.
00:21:20 Ray Rasmussen
You know how to.
00:21:21 Ray Rasmussen
Evolve the grid in a manner that you know these forecasting, yeah.
00:21:23 Chris Sass
So you're saying digital twins right now, when you're saying grid models or what, what do you mean by grid models?
00:21:28 Ray Rasmussen
Well, we certainly can use digital twins. We talked earlier about that with the Siemens folks that are certainly doing some of that work and that's.
00:21:36 Ray Rasmussen
Very interesting, but I'm.
00:21:38 Ray Rasmussen
Really talking about taking and aggregating information from different sources. The thing about models is that they tend to work pretty well without artificial intelligence, where artificial intelligence.
00:21:48 Ray Rasmussen
Really gives you.
00:21:49 Ray Rasmussen
A leg up is when you have multiple sore.
00:21:51 Ray Rasmussen
And they're different, and you've got to do something to rationalize that in the manner that gives you something you can really use. So you might have a grid model, potentially a twin, but you might have other information about capacity forecasts and other things that really make a big difference with respect to where you want to go, what artificial intelligence can do is look.
00:22:11 Ray Rasmussen
Over all of that information and begin to offer you insights into what you can predict and what you can see coming into the future. Maybe the actions you need to take.
00:22:23 Jeff McAulay
Great. So Ray, bring this home for us. Let's jump in our time machines five years from now, we're we're following up and we say, gosh, thank God, our local utility adopted an AI platform because they just rolled out blank. That has really been impactful and visible in our lives. And I'll give you some choices.
00:22:42 Jeff McAulay
Right.
00:22:44 Jeff McAulay
We had power outages due to a storm and the utility had more intelligent routing and restoration in their disaster relief or hey, I finally had a customer service agent that literally knew all of the different thing and didn't send me bouncing around to five different departments to find an answer or.
00:23:04 Jeff McAulay
I was able to get my behind the meter solar interconnected in less than 30 days because there wasn't this bunch of hoop jumping to get interconnection 33 examples off the top of my head you can.
00:23:18 Jeff McAulay
Add another one or pick your favorite.
00:23:21 Ray Rasmussen
Well.
00:23:24 Ray Rasmussen
First of all I want to touch on one of the things you said. You saw some of this happen already. You know, in Texas they had a cold snap this last winter and when they not this one coming up the one before and 52% of the generation was done by renewables during that period because the natural gas plants have problems when that when they hit the those cold.
00:23:43 Ray Rasmussen
Steps.
00:23:44 Ray Rasmussen
And so one of the things you're seeing is that kind of resilience coming out of changes, some of it due to artificial intelligence, some of it doing, just rewiring grid a little bit. And that's the same thing with wiring up your house. I think part of the problem is the infrastructure you're trying to hook it up to, not so much artificial intelligence. But let me offer a third one.
00:24:04 Ray Rasmussen
Where what we might be doing is optimizing for electric vehicles and we're trying to do plans that you know.
00:24:10 Ray Rasmussen
Allow our our people.
00:24:12 Ray Rasmussen
To you know.
00:24:14 Ray Rasmussen
Manage their commutes and manage their long distance travel and to manage in in a way that's going to really work. And you've certainly seen a lot of that.
00:24:20 Ray Rasmussen
Under.
00:24:21 Ray Rasmussen
Development. But what if that planning was assisted by artificial intelligence that gave you a forecast on the demand for charging units based on our prediction of electric vehicle sales?
00:24:32 Ray Rasmussen
So that would be an example that might be just a little bit out there that I think could be valuable, but we're already seeing some of the stuff.
00:24:38 Ray Rasmussen
I think you touched on already.
00:24:42 Jeff McAulay
Great. Well, right, this has been fascinating. I think really important for us to realize that there are near term applications for AI with conventional systems. It doesn't have to be a crazy startup. It doesn't have to be a whiz bang, you know, high flying promise that there are real actionable.
00:25:00 Jeff McAulay
Maybe eat your vegetables kind of applications, but hey, vegetables are important, so thank you for being a guide through the finally realized promise of corporate Internet platforms and an exciting view into what might be next.
00:25:17 Ray Rasmussen
May I? Well, first of all, thank you for having me. May I characterize what you just said this way, I think it's all about finding an on ramp. That's no, no, no regrets.
00:25:29 Ray Rasmussen
That allows you.
00:25:30 Ray Rasmussen
To build the team internally that you really need in a manner that positions your organization for the kind of future we.
00:25:37 Ray Rasmussen
Were talking about.
00:25:38 Ray Rasmussen
For most of the people, most of.
00:25:40 Ray Rasmussen
The folks we deal with.
00:25:42 Ray Rasmussen
Are are very interested in that dramatic future, but they want to make sure that they're well prepared for it. And so the case I'm making is that start where you're at, build this muscle internally. If you need a little outside help. There are folks like us and others that can can help you with that. But look at a way to get yourself positioned for the future that I think we can see.
00:26:03 Chris Sass
Well, cool. I appreciate that, Ray. I I thank you for giving us your guidance and your experience and helping paint a picture of an on ramp to to get there if you're not already playing in some of these spaces, I'd assume that your company probably is looking at these opportunities and how to get there. So I think this will probably come help and helpful.
00:26:22 Chris Sass
I appreciate your time today and it's been a pleasure. Thanks again.
00:26:25 Ray Rasmussen
Thank you.
00:26:26 Chris Sass
For audience, we hope you've enjoyed this episode. We tried to bring you more information on AI Ken to giving you what's taking place in the industry. If you like this content, don't forget to subscribe. If you've got questions or feedback, leave comments, go to the YouTube channel and put your comments there or leave them on our LinkedIn channel and we look forward to answering your questions in real time.
00:26:46 Chris Sass
See you again next time on.
00:26:46 Chris Sass
The Insider's Guide to Energy bye for now.