A round-up of what the utility community has been working on through August 2026 — a new Utility Voice article on AI accountability, the weekly DER research, and the run-up to the October conference in San Antonio. Each item links to its source.
City of Tacoma Journey to S/4 – Municipalites have a huge challege to keep up with the demands of running an electric and water utility, while also supporting policy, fire, courts, community venues, permits, etc. The City of Tacoma has been leading with their SAP implementation by over 20 years and continues to lead. Read their story.
Who owns the outcome when an AI agent acts — the newest Utility Voice picks up where the security and governance pieces left off. Connecting an AI model to SAP takes an afternoon; naming who is accountable for what it did is the part that stalls production. The article works through the read/understand/recommend/act spectrum, the tool layer as an ungoverned control plane, and how NERC CIP and the European conformity regime each ask the question in a different language. Read it here.
Autonomous Enterprise:
SAP Utility Voice: The Accountability Gate – who owns the outcome when an AI agent acts.
SAP Utility Voice: Important Updates to the API Policy and the Audits you need to do now.
SAP Utility Voice: Strategic Agreements – What we all agree on.
SAP Utility Voice: The customer an agent sees.
SAP Utility Voice: The Data an agent reads.
ASUG Utility Voice: Who secures the Autonomous Enterprise
ASUG Utility Voice: A call to action for Utilities to influence SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise
The control room is the VPP bottleneck — a look at what EPRI’s FLEXIT work means for your ADMS, and why the operator-facing layer is where distributed flexibility actually gets blocked. Read it here.
The weekly DER digest kept running all month — distributed energy research synthesised and published every Friday. Browse the digest archive here.
SAP for Utilities, 6–9 October, San Antonio, Texas — registration is open and the Tuesday workshops fill up first. The agenda has filters by track, session type, product and role. If you are going, the accountability thread above is the one I most want to pull on there — find me.
SAP for Utilities, next summer 2027 – June 29-July 1, Seville, Spain – planning committee meetings are underway.
A new Enterprise Architect team site — a utilities-only space for architects to share artifacts, discussions and webinars. Have a look here, request access, and I will let you in.
Two other things worth bookmarking: our webinar library, which now runs to two years of sessions, and the topic subscription page if you would rather only hear about the areas you work in.
If you would like any of the recordings, or if something here is useful and you want to talk about it, email me at marc@utility.community.
Marc Rosson
Utility.Community
425-297-0133