New York gives utilities 60 days to inventory every AI system they run
Victoria Shinder1 min readThe New York Public Service Commission has opened an inquiry into how regulated utilities use artificial intelligence. The order, dated 17 September, requires electric, gas and water utilities to return a written inventory report within 60 days describing all AI use cases in their operations.
The regulator's stated concern is a double one: that AI systems create risk for the organisations running them, and that they are nonetheless being used more and more for ordinary day-to-day tasks. Consolidated Edison, which serves New York City, told Utility Dive that it already applies AI to customer service and system inspections, and that it will continue to evaluate opportunities as the technology evolves.
What it means
The instrument here is worth separating from the rhetoric. This is not a rule about what utilities may do with AI; it is a census. Sixty days and a written inventory of every use case — that is a regulator establishing what it is actually looking at before deciding whether anything needs governing.
Which makes the inventory itself the interesting document, and the hard one. Customer-service triage and inspection imagery are easy to name. The harder entries are the ones that arrived inside a vendor product: load forecasting with a model in it, asset-health scoring bundled with a monitoring platform, outage prediction as a feature of the outage management system. A utility that answers only with the tools it chose deliberately will return a short list and an inaccurate one, and the gap between that list and reality is precisely the "growing dependency" the Commission says it is worried about.