Why is NOW the right time to adopt AI-driven vegetation management?
There’s one big question that core industries with geographically distributed assets are constantly asking – How do we prevent vegetation encroachment incidents without a constant dependence on manual checking and reporting?
When a company has assets that are spread across thousands of miles, it becomes very difficult to manually monitor the entire network. In the absence of visibility, there is a high probability of disruptive vegetation encroachment which could adversely impact their supply network. Such incidents will have a direct effect on productivity and in case of industries like telecom and power utilities, their customers themselves.
These collective losses could lead to big trouble. A major case in point is that of an American utilities company which is facing an estimated $30 billion USD liabilities due to losses caused by wildfires sparked on their power network in 2017 and 2018. This is exactly why vegetation management is an urgent problem facing core industries and AI-driven technology might just be able to provide the best solution.
Artificial Intelligence in the digital era
Digital is the new buzzword that is driving innovation in this era. The best companies in the world are seeking digital transformation in order to work faster and get better at what they do. The emergence of the technological infrastructure to enable digitization has only sped along the process of transformation. From laptops to smartphones, IoT has ensured that all resources are always connected to the grid.
The results of this digital shift so far have been stunning, but there’s even more potential to unlock, especially for core industries where the proliferation of technology solutions has been relatively slower. According to the World Economic Forum, the metals and mining industry could unlock $400 billion in value with the use of digital and the oil and gas sector could unlock as much as $4.5 trillion.
Artificial intelligence has been at the forefront of this shift to digital, with the power of AI being utilized by diverse industries like transportation, healthcare, marketing and much more. In fact, according to Gartner, 80% of emerging technologies will have AI foundations by 2021.
Given the growing prevalence of AI across industries and verticals, it is now the right time to adopt AI-driven vegetation management as the solution to one of the major problems that have been facing core industries. With the successful utilization of AI, there is a much lower dependence on the ground-level workers to take reactive actions to minimize damage, as AI will enable a more proactive approach to vegetation management.
AI is the perfect solution for companies with distributed assets. Traditionally these companies have had to depend on multiple manual process points for information and spend time and money on data verification and analysis. AI on the other hand gives them a single data repository and smart platform to view and assess their entire asset network.
The Time is Now!
Now is the best time to adopt AI-driven solutions for vegetation management. The technological infrastructure already exists to make this a seamless migration and AI is delivering multiple business benefits in other industries and processes. If companies do not adopt AI-driven vegetation management now, they risk losing out on the opportunity to address systematic inefficiencies that have been plaguing core industries for decades.
AiDash is one of the leading companies providing AI-driven solutions for core industries and AiDash Intelligent Vegetation Management System (IVMS) is a dedicated SaaS product for vegetation management. IVMS utilizes high-resolution multispectral and SAR data from the world’s leading satellite constellations, which are then fed into its proprietary AI models to make timely predictions for asset management and operations activities of industries that have geographically dispersed assets.