“Human, never too human: from governance to training, artificial intelligence at the service of energy”. This is the intervention in Book of Facts 2024 Of Stefano CiurliHead of Global Services at Enel, author of the contribution in the volume now in its 34th edition.
Stefano Ciurli’s speech
“There is a common thread that unites the energy transition path, competitiveness on global markets and the offer of increasingly efficient and tailor-made services: it is the ability to innovate, and to place ourselves on the frontier of technology while remaining coherent with its own strategic vision. This applies to every company, especially if it is multinational, but it is even more true for those who deal with an essential good such as energy.
Today Enel is present in 28 countries and 5 continents, and is leading Italy’s energy transition – with over 75% of electricity production in the country coming from renewables alone – also because innovation has been able to make the decisive lever of the digital transformation of the Group. In a context in which technological evolutions are becoming more and more sudden, the disruptive phenomenon of artificial intelligence has quickly transformed from a curious imaginative projection to a topical topic, and with the Chat GPT boom of November 2022 it has definitively become a real consumer element, increasingly present in the daily lives of people and companies.
The elephant in the room? Not for those who have built a solid digital positioning over the years: Enel is a totally cloud company, and today it can already count on around three thousand people active in ICT. It is the reason why, precisely because they took root in already fertile ground, we seized the innovative opportunities of artificial intelligence by exploiting its extraordinary potential along our entire value chain, from generation to distribution, from the market to services: this translates into predictive models to manage plants better and better, in advanced algorithms to immediately identify and resolve anomalies, but also in tools for safeguarding workplace safety and in agile energy platforms for customers. It is not enough, however, because beyond algorithms, geopolitical issues and security, the decisive game in artificial intelligence is played in the field of governance.
A fact now established also at European level, as demonstrated by the adoption of the AI Act, the regulation – in force since August – which, in addition to presenting proposals to stimulate innovation and development, establishes obligations relating to intelligence artificial based on possible risks and the level of impact. Precisely to promptly implement a continually evolving regulatory framework – European with the AI Act, but also national as part of the Italian Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2024-2026 -, Enel has created, the first of the utilities, a Committee for the governance of traditional and generative artificial intelligence, with the aim of studying and adopting a model, inserted in the various business units but unitary in the government, which provides solutions to the entire Group.
A tool to govern complexity, but also to make artificial intelligence the ideal lever for evolving internal skills and regenerating individual talents, in the awareness that it is always man who must be at the helm of every process.”