Beyond Point Solutions: Building the Intelligent Utility Platform
Utilities have spent decades digitizing customer engagement, but major operational events continue to expose a critical gap: fragmented situational awareness. During storms, wildfires, outages, and emerging grid threats, utility leaders are forced to make high-stakes decisions using disconnected systems, delayed field visibility, and incomplete customer intelligence. This keynote will explore how leading utilities are evolving from reactive response models to real-time operational intelligence—combining outage systems, customer communications, hazard reporting, community-generated data, field intelligence, and AI-assisted insights into a shared operating picture. Attendees will learn how utilities are reducing blind spots, accelerating response, improving coordination across operations and emergency management, and strengthening customer trust during both major events and everyday operations.The discussion will also examine how utilities can operationalize customer and community signals without overwhelming operations teams—transforming fragmented data into faster decisions, clearer communications, and more resilient utility operations.
Moderator:
Ian Rinehart, Vice President, Ad Hoc Group
Ian Rinehart is a Vice President at The Ad Hoc Group, a specialized advisory firm that helps energy innovators navigate regulated markets, build utility partnerships, and scale solutions. Working at the intersection of utility strategy, emerging technology and regulation, Ian brings a practical understanding of how innovation moves from concept to industry adoption. Over more than 15 years in the energy sector, Ian has served as an entrepreneur, product leader, consultant, and utility advisor. At Opower, Ian helped deliver energy-efficiency solutions to enterprise utilities and more than five million customers while experiencing the company’s growth from startup through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. A Fulbright Scholar and Clean Energy Leadership Institute Fellow, Ian brings a valuable perspective on how utilities evaluate, adopt, and scale innovation.
Panelists:
Taryn Sims, VP, Customer Experience & Engagement, Duke Energy
Taryn Sims is Vice President of Customer Experience & Engagement at Duke Energy, where she leads enterprise customer strategy, insights, and engagement. She oversees voice of customer metrics, segmentation, marketing and communications, and the technology that enables coordinated, scalable outreach. Her team partners across the business to translate customer insight into channel strategy, platform modernization, and operating models that strengthen trust and performance. She also directs customer communications during storms and outages. With more than 20 years of experience, she has held leadership roles across customer experience, media relations, and strategy, including positions at Safety-Kleen and Ahold Delhaize.
Jody Allison, Vice President of Customer Experience Operations and Transformation, Xcel Energy
Jody Allison is Vice President of Customer Experience Operations and Transformation at Xcel Energy, bringing more than 20 years of leadership across utilities, financial services and other complex industries. Previously, she held executive roles at Algonquin Power & Utilities/Liberty and National Grid, leading large-scale transformation, customer operations and performance-improvement initiatives. Jody is known for connecting customer experience with operational and financial performance and for guiding organizations through complex change. She holds an Executive MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology and is a Certified Credit Executive and Certified Fraud Examiner.
Stephenie Howard, Vice President of Customer Strategy and Platform Development, CenterPoint Energy
Stephenie Howard is Vice President of Customer Strategy and Platform Development at CenterPoint Energy, where she serves as business owner for customer- and employee-facing technologies and several customer support functions. With more than 25 years of utility experience, she has led teams across engineering, construction, analytics and customer service. Her work includes major technology and process transformations involving SAP, web and IVR platforms, and CenterPoint’s Outage Tracker. Stephenie holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from Louisiana Tech University.
Steve Mann, Chief Technology Officer, DataCapable
Stephen Mann is Chief Technology Officer of DataCapable, where he leads the architecture and evolution of a platform serving six of the ten largest U.S. electric utilities. A software architect and tech founder, Stephen specializes in high-performance, scalable and reliable solutions for utilities. He brings a solution-oriented and thoughtful perspective on building resilient technology that turns complex utility data into trusted intelligence when performance matters most.
Learn More and Register for EMACS
View All EMACS 2026 Session Details
