Scott Reese, CEO with GE Digital

Yeah.

Sure. Scott Reese. I'm kind of a software nerd that spent a lot of time in manufacturing, so a lot of passion for all things manufacturing. But over the last decade or so, really spent my time moving all things manufacturing to the cloud and realizing the power of the cloud and what it can do to tackle some of the big problems. And you're now at GE looking forward to doing that same thing around the energy transition.

Yes. If you think about what the cloud just does in general, it gives us the ability to compute things that previously we just didn't have a way to compute. So many of the problems that we're facing in the world are computable problems. So we want to bring the power of the cloud to the point of the problem. And with the energy transition, so many things that we need to tackle, these are computable problems. We just need to apply the software to the problem and make the humans tackling those problems a lot more capable.

No question. And there are a lot of regulatory elements that we need with utilities. And the shift of the cloud won't happen overnight. What we want to do is make sure that we are painting the picture and making sure everybody sees what a better future looks like. Because we're convinced around the energy transition in particular that the next 10 years, the work that we do there is going to have a multi-generational impact. So we just want to make sure that we're doing the hard work that we know is going to have that multi-generational impact and leave a legacy that we can all be proud of.

It's tricky. Electrons historically float in one direction. And now that you and I have solar panels, windmills are showing up everywhere. It's no longer a unidirectional flow of electrons. So utilities are having to figure out how do we bring these things on safely without destabilizing our grid. And those are the challenges that we want to help with. Because if we don't tackle those things, a lot of the renewables are going to get resisted. Oh yeah, they will, and we're never going to move the needle. Right. So cleaner energy is obviously the answer, but we have to be planful and intentional about how we bring those onto the grid so that we don't destabilize things.

Yeah, so again, it all comes back to software. We don't believe there's any way that the energy transition happens without software. And one of our most recent acquisitions is a company called Opus One, which brings the ability to have visibility and ultimately manage these renewable assets. And bringing those into our ADMS solution where people are managing the historical grid and making those renewables a natural part of the ecosystem is not only important, but we think software is the way that that happens. And that's been our big focus at GE Digital.

Yeah, and this is the terminology I use: these are computable problems. But unless we build the software, we have the AI in place, we don't know what to compute, right? And there's deterministic computable problems and there's non-deterministic computable problems. And one of the things that I built out in a prior role previous to GE is something we call generative design, where you frame the problem and then literally the cloud will compute every solution to that problem, could be millions, and brings back to you based on what you care about, here's the one solution to the problem that is literally the most optimal solution, not just one that simply works. A lot of those same dynamics, a lot of those same patterns around computability apply to helping us accelerate the energy transition.

Yeah, they have to be reliable, they have to apply holes. And this is where, in the last decade or so in building out those generative capabilities, one of the roles I had to play was making sure that our cloud worked. Because same thing, you don't have four or five nines in your cloud, nobody's gonna use it. One of the things that you do to make that happen is you monitor normal activities and you know what normal looks like, and then you're constantly monitoring and looking for abnormal patterns. And so that's just well understood science in the cloud. The same applies around asset management. This is where IoT can really bring value to the equation. So with some of our solutions like APM, we're able to monitor what normal looks like, look for abnormal patterns, and flag them to whoever it is, an end user or an operator, and let them tackle that problem in a planful way instead of waiting for it to be a big problem that inconveniences everyone. I was just in Atlanta at our monitoring and diagnostic center there, where we monitor over 3,000 power generation units all around the world, 83 countries. And that's a place where as soon as something abnormal starts to happen, we know first and we're able to call the customer and say, 'Hey, I don't know exactly what's going on, but you might want to take a look at it.' And then they're able to go out and check it out. And with that ability to have insights into the health of that asset, you can press the time. You don't want catastrophic, you don't want it. You want to be able to proactively apply the maintenance that is necessary for that asset for minimal impact.

Yeah, that's the game. Yeah, that's the AI/ML type of component. Because we have limitations, we do. We need that ability to have those platforms in place to say, 'That's fine, that's fine, that's fine. Well, there's a piece of data and do it quickly and then be able to notify you that something's going on.'

Look, it's all about taking action quickly. And that's the reason why I came out of the job that I had for nearly two decades and came to GE Digital. Because I believe in the energy transition, but we're out of time. We have to get after it. We have to get serious. And we have to take advantage of the assets that we have, the power of the cloud in particular, and bring it to... See, GE brings that trust. The majority of all the turbines on the turbine deck are GE, the generator, GE. They're out there. So you have this wealth of knowledge. And from a utilities perspective, utilities culture is not known for being the leader in this innovation journey. They're going to wait till something is truly, 'Okay, it works. Okay, I'm gonna...' That's where GE comes into play. You can point to it, it's like right there, there it is. That gives that comfort, that trust.

I'm a nerd. I just like, I know. It's like this, this is the digital coffee table, industrial digital coffee table right here. Because I know that I can continue because I... What's interesting, I don't even know some of the questions to ask. All I know is that it's happening. We've got to do it. We've got to have that collaborative type of play with all the parties to come up with a solution that is somewhat, to a certain extent, invisible to the end user. They don't know what's going on, it just happens magically, sort of like that cloud, SaaS, all of that stuff. It just sort of gets better and they don't even know it. It's happening, but it's not happening fast enough. And that's why if you go over and look at our booth, we use the word 'accelerate.' Accelerate the energy transition, because we believe it's not happening fast enough. And we're out of time. Let's be clear, the time is now. And again, that's why I'm excited to be here. It's easy to get people rallied around a mission, a time-based mission. We're not just doing work. We're not coming here to do work. We're coming here to make the world a better place and to have it be here for multiple generations after us.

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