Water utilities are facing a knowledge drain that no hiring campaign can fully replace.
As veteran operators retire, decades of experience with pumps, filters, treatment processes, and emergency response can leave with them. Travis Wagner of Trinnex says artificial intelligence could help preserve part of that institutional knowledge—but not by trying to replace the operator.
Utilities already hold much of the raw material in operations and maintenance manuals, standard operating procedures, and years of historical data. AI tools can be trained to search those records and quickly surface instructions that once required digging through binders or thousands of pages of PDFs.
The real value is not an all-knowing chatbot. It is a tightly controlled system that draws from the utility’s own documents and helps the next operator find a credible answer faster.
AI will not capture everything a 40-year operator knows. But it could keep more of that experience inside the utility and make it usable on the next shift.
Episode at https://youtu.be/Kcx9gFTKcsY?si=DPfqAN1VFbirrllL
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