Utility Integration

The Book of Slalom: Preaching the gospel of sustainable AI

The Book of Slalom: Preaching the gospel of sustainable AI
Tim Stafford delivers keynote remarks at GridTECH Connect Forum - California in June, 2024 (courtesy: Slalom)

We are in an arms race. It’s not explicitly a sprint between nation-states, nor does its culmination necessarily end in destruction.

Right now, quite frankly, it’s more about who has the shiniest toy.

Tim Stafford, managing director at technology consulting company Slalom, bears witness to the works of AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and their ilk accelerating the capabilities of artificial intelligence. AI and machine learning are front and center for Slalom right now, as stakeholders from all corners of the business world clamor to understand how this new technology will affect operations.

“At this point, the use cases are not keeping up with what the models can do,” Stafford cautions. “A lot of these models are getting larger and more complex just to prove the technology out.”

As the models expand, they require more and more energy. Data centers could double their energy usage by 2026, according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) report, eclipsing 1,000 terawatt-hours (THh) of total electricity consumption. While utility companies and grid operators reckon with accommodating the resulting load growth, Stafford doubts most of the general public understands the impact an everyday search query has on the grid.

“People just aren’t aware of just how much energy some of these models take to run,” theorizes Stafford. “They’re using a tremendous amount of energy for very simple things that you can do in much less energy-exhaustive ways.”

“An OpenAI ChatGPT request used to take ten times more energy than a Google search,” he continues. “I see people checking the Yankees score on ChatGPT and I’m like dude, seriously?! Why do you do that? It’s crazy to me. And that was the old version!”

– Tim Stafford, managing director at Slalom

That sort of behavior is starting to irk Stafford. Over the last few months, he has been spreading a gospel of AI sustainability in preparation for “two perfect storms” set to collide- the energy industry, as we race to electrify everything- and the proliferation of massive AI models drawing more energy from our grid.

If we don’t make developing sustainable AI a priority, Slalom’s managing director fears we’re headed for a future of haves and have-nots.

“High-tech companies are going to find ways to afford getting the energy they need, when they need it, for what they need it for. The average consumer doesn’t always have that flexibility,” he asserts. “So we’re creating a huge inequality in the way that energy can be consumed by people versus companies when it’s needed, and AI is just going to make that worse.”

The road warrior

In the 2009 film Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character is a traveling consultant fixated on earning 10 million miles on American Airlines. When he ultimately achieves the feat, the pilot (played by an immaculately mustachioed Sam Elliott, naturally) comes out mid-flight to congratulate him on the astounding achievement.

“In my head, I had this scene,” recalls Stafford, then a frequent traveler himself. “That’s what it’s going to be like when I reach one million miles.”

Stafford got to 999,000 miles on United Airlines and stopped flying the carrier in anticipation of the big event. He wanted the moment to be special. Where should he fly? What should he wear? Is Sam Elliott even available?

Ultimately, Stafford decided to plan a trip to Hawai’i with his wife. But before he could book the flight, a strange package arrived on his doorstep. Congratulations from United! You’re a million miler!

“I said that’s impossible. That can’t be the case.”

Stafford picked up the phone. He immediately got a human on the line (the perks of being in the million-mile club, assuredly) and asked her to take the miles back. “The woman was a little dumbfounded,” he laughed. “This guy is complaining he has too many miles!”

It would been easier to just take the miles than look into the issue, she protested. But the customer is always right. The next day, she called back.

It turns out our frequent flier had some miles on Continental Airlines, which merged with United on October 1, 2010. “We took the liberty to combine your accounts and bring in your miles as a courtesy,” she explained.

Stafford was floored. “So you’re telling me I went over one million miles during a data conversion of a system upgrade? As a technology consultant… Incredibly disappointing.” He had suffered the ultimate indignity.

“There was no pomp or circumstance,” he lamented. “Nor would there have been, by the way. It wasn’t like they were going to do anything anyway.”

Alas, his Hollywood hopes and dreams were built on a foundation of sand. And what’s worse?

“I found out I’m no George Clooney,” Stafford chuckles.

Slalom managing director Tim Stafford (left) moderates a conversation on stage (courtesy: Slalom)

The carrot or the stick?

Stafford spent a lot of time away from home leading up to his million-mile moment of disappointment. He started his professional career upgrading ComEd’s CIS system in Chicago, granting him early exposure to the utility industry. Years later, Stafford ended up in California, where transformational things percolated throughout the utility markets in the early-to-mid-2000s.

Early efforts focused on altering customer behavior. Knowing supply would be constrained, could utilities address the demand side of the equation and get customers to move their use of energy to better accommodate the utility market? Fat chance, it turned out.

“We heavily debated the idea of the carrot or the stick,” Stafford recalled. The carrot, in this case, was a financial incentive for customers to shed load during peak periods. “We found that incentive didn’t really work. A lot of times, customers weren’t actively changing behavior.”

They pivoted to the stick: time-of-use rates. Around the same time, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) started to gain a foothold, as utilities began to recognize the value of understanding their customers and the mechanisms that can modify their behaviors.

“We built a lot of that into the early time-of-use programs in California and they were very successful, Stafford says. “We saw significant changes in behavior from all sorts of customer demographics.”

That got him hooked.

“I loved the fact that the industry was undergoing such a large transformational need,” he recollects. “It just was apparent that this industry had to change. As a consultant, it’s very exciting to be working with companies that know they need to change and have the desire to change.”

Now those entities have a mandate to change, further accelerating progress.

“I think there’s an acknowledgment that we have to modernize now. I don’t think that was the case ten years ago,” he admits. “I think everybody has adopted the philosophy that we can’t do this in a silo by ourselves.”

Stafford has spent two decades working to help his partners transform and modernize their operations while sorting out the roles technology can play in accelerating innovation. Yet with all that experience- and so many miles- the proliferation of artificial intelligence gave his whole company pause.

Tim Stafford (right) addresses a panel (courtesy: Slalom)

Preaching the gospel of sustainable AI

Last fall, a lot of Slalom’s customers started asking about AI. Enough that the whole company decided to pause and ponder the ethical considerations of the technology before moving forward.

“I would imagine we left money on the table by pausing like that,” Stafford notes. “But it was important for us to instill that every element of our AI strategy with our clients is always anchored in: Ethically, what are we doing? What’s the bias of this model? And why are we using AI?”

Slalom sought to establish moral boundaries for its own team before consulting with its partners about what the tech could mean for them. Stafford says he’s proud of the early use cases the firm adopted, noting they’re generally for things we could all argue benefit society.

“We’re seeing our clients making tremendous technology and efficiency gains on what AI is doing right now,” he declares. “We are also enabling workforces to really harness the power of AI. We’re not doing it to lay people off or migrate that labor to technology. It’s more about enhancing the capabilities the workforce can have.”

Slalom’s managing director recognizes artificial intelligence as a transformational technology, more like the internet than blockchain. “The horse is out of the barn,” as he puts it. AI won’t be a passing fad, and it won’t be a fringe use case technology.

“We believe firmly that this will be a transformation element not just in people’s lives, but also in businesses, and it will continue to accelerate,” he asserts.

Yet Stafford has seen an alarming lack of concern for sustainability in the AI space. Instead, all the buzz seems to be about the arms race- who can build the fastest, most accurate model? Speed and accuracy are great, but ultimately we will have to reckon with the ethical dilemmas artificial intelligence presents, especially within the energy industry.

“Will it completely replace our need for having human beings do anything? No. I don’t believe that. I think human ingenuity and creativity are the core essence of who we are and AI cannot replace that.”

– Tim Stafford, managing director of Slalom

One company he works with built an internal AI platform that informs its users how much CO2 the model will produce to run. Stafford loves that approach. He sees spreading general awareness as the starting point of any sustainable AI conversation.

“I think we can go way further,” he predicts. “I think we can actually use AI to optimize AI for energy efficiency. That’s something we can do.”

The next million miles

Tim Stafford still cherishes the status earned as a frequent flier, but he’s not the road warrior he was before he joined Slalom six years ago. Rather than sending its people across the country, the consulting firm has purposefully set up shop in cities with major customers. Slalom was born in 2001 in Seattle and has remained a private company that earns 100% of its gross organically; they’ve never acquired another firm.

“For a lot of us road warriors who were on the road a lot, that was a very attractive idea, to be closer to your family and friends,” Stafford confesses.

Now his travel is a little more targeted. The road warrior is more concerned with being a good dad, introducing his daughter to other cultures and taking her to some of the locales he once jet-setted through.

Every day poses a unique challenge for Stafford. He says he’s proud to be doing real work to solve some of the world’s hardest problems.

“I’m not over-dramatizing to say I think we’ve saved some people’s lives over the last few years in that space with the type of technology solutions we’ve helped utilities implement and the proactive communications that we give customers to provide forewarning of events like wildfires,” he says.

Stafford is seeing a lot of interest from his clients in asset management and digital twins- the intersection of equipment and the grid, from a digital perspective. How can we learn more about assets in the field, their condition, and how they interact with one another? Data and analytics are integral to those conversations, and many ultimately loop back into a discussion about AI, giving Slalom’s managing director a chance to sound his drum.

“People need to recognize how important sustainably-built AI is,” Stafford insists. “Let’s be aware of what we’re doing, take that, and bake it into the corporate landscape.”

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