Hydro Ottawa finds time savings while testing Google’s AI

While AI has been in the hype cycle for the past two years, real tools are starting to come out and Hydro Ottawa has been using Google’s AI Workplace tools and found them super helpful.

The company started with a 12-week pilot program and quickly found that even people not in the program were eager to test out the AI tools. Hydro Ottawa’s chief information and technology officer, Mark Fernandes, says the program started with 50 people and quickly grew to 96.

Fernandes champions training and educating his team and claims they’re the most important steps. The teams underwent AI training to ensure everyone knows how AI can help them and its limitations. The power generation company also has an AI policy to help keep up with best practices for using AI.

Fernandes says that the company has used AI to help summarize long documents, as an email tool, to create internal/external communications and to write job descriptions for hiring. Outside of Google’s standard Workplace AI tools, it’s also trying to use Google’s Vertex AI to analyze pictures of broken equipment to help the company triage power outages faster. The IT department is also using AI to help debug and write code.

Overall, Hydro Ottawa is satisfied with the Google AI tools and is looking forward to getting more out of them as the tools get better and better. When asked if he worries about the work quality going down, Mark again points back to the AI training that’s been done. He understands that all humans want to take shortcuts, but he hopes that if the training gets through to people, they will make sure to double-check the AI’s work to make sure it stands up to the quality of a human worker.

Image source: Hydro Ottawa