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Taking AI from assistance to action in solar

Published in: Solar, Ask the Experts, Exclusive Articles

Taking AI from assistance to action in solar image

Emily Obenauer, Director of Product Marketing at Sitetracker, explains why the next phase of AI in solar will be less about answering questions and more about getting real work done, from managing permits and close-out packages to spotting operational risks before they become costly delays.

PES: Thanks for joining us, Emily. How are solar companies using AI in their day-to-day work, and where could it make the biggest difference?

Emily Obenauer: Most solar companies today are using AI at the ‘assistance’ level: surfacing information, answering questions, pulling together data that’s scattered across systems and drafting documents. That’s real and useful because it takes friction out of the day. But it’s the shallow end.

The biggest difference comes when AI moves from telling you something to doing something: advancing a permit renewal, processing a close-out package or flagging a subcontractor whose pace has slipped before it shows up in a status report.

The industry’s real constraint is getting work done quickly with flat or shrinking headcount. Solar economics have always been sensitive to time. Every day a built asset sits uncommissioned is lost generation against capital already spent.

So AI can make the biggest difference where it increases how much work a given team can reliably move forward. That’s less about any single clever feature and more about where an organisation sits on a maturity curve, from assistance to AI that orchestrates workflows and, ultimately, intelligence that connects insight across an entire portfolio.

PES: There’s a lot of talk about connecting AI to company data. What additional context does a solar business need to turn that into something genuinely useful for its operations?

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