Predictive analytics

Hey, this is Kalen, and welcome to The Drop.

It's part two of Pipes Planning and Predictive AI.

We sit down once again with Dave Brown to discuss EMWD's experiences with our predictive AI, acoustic listening devices, and what one year with this program now looks like.

Let's dive in.

Today is part two of our discussion on AI.

Dave Brown, Director of Maintenance here at Eastern.

I've been with the district 23 years, and I oversee the maintenance and repair of our potable and recycled water systems along with our lift stations.

Part of that, and one of the projects that we talked about last year and are talking about now again is Voda and our use of AI, predictive AI, I guess, to kind of help us identify potential line breaks, leaks, things that need to be repaired before they happen.

And so I had, you know, picked up these lessons along the way, a bunch of them.

And, you know, one was, I thought this predictive analytics stuff was pretty cool.

And I also had an appreciation for software as a service, which that was something that was brand new.

You know, we had done that in how we took the cross optimization offer to market.

And I saw a lot of benefit in that over the legacy, you know, kind of build hard software approach.

And so I got, again, sort of fortuitously reconnected with someone who had been one of my vendors at the oil company.

He was a predictive analytics expert and he would do site modeling.

And so he would help you figure out where to put your concept, your restaurant, your retail store, or for us, our fleet fueling.

Well,

predictive analysis is something that they take very seriously.

Right.

Totally.

And I can explain what some of that is if you want, because that is the technocracy movement talk about wanting to do predictive analysis.

Totally.

Yeah.

As soon as that shelf is filled with enough stuff, your paradigm changes.

Today, we are delighted to have Eric Siegel back on the mic.

He's the co-founder of Gooder AI and the author of a couple books you may have heard of, the AI Playbook and Predictive Analytics.

It's his second time on the show.

Thanks for coming back, Eric.

And it's sort of a level of geeky narcissism of like, I just want to make it do what I do.

capable of everything I do.

And instead of that, and those sort of philosophical problems with that, wait, the best way to ramp up capability is machine learning, is learning from example, many, many examples, right? And certainly we've seen that come to light, deep learning revolution, and more recently, generative AI and large language models, but still good old fashioned machine learning, which is older, but not old school and otherwise known as enterprise machine learning, predictive AI, predictive analytics, right? This is the technology you turn to to improve your existing large-scale operations, learning from data to predict who's going to click, buy, lie, die, commit an act of fraud, any outcome or behavior.

So I'm spending a lot of my time these days trying to remind the world that generative AI and large language models are not the only game in town, that Most organizations, and this is very subversive of me to say, should be investing at least as much in predictive AI types of projects as they are in generative AI, even though it's potentially the fruit's much lower hanging and the footprint is much smaller, the investment's much smaller.