2027 Event Agenda

When a line of severe storms tears across southeastern Wisconsin after midnight, or when wildfire conditions force a Public Safety Power Shutoff in San Diego County, the first thing hundreds of thousands of customers do is reach for their phones. They want one answer: when will my power come back, and can I trust what you are telling me. The quality of that answer, delivered in the opening minutes of an event, now shapes customer satisfaction and public trust more than almost anything else a utility does.

This session shows how Wisconsin Energy Corporation, through We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service, and San Diego Gas & Electric closed the gap between the systems that run the grid and the systems that talk to customers. Both utilities faced the same hard truth: no single vendor platform could satisfy every requirement for accurate communication, system performance, and customer experience during a major event. The operational data existed, but it sat scattered across outage management, ADMS, GIS, and customer platforms that were never designed to speak to one another in real time.

The answer was event-driven architecture on cloud-native foundations, built to each utility's reality rather than forced into one template. That platform-agnostic approach is itself a key finding: the right integration layer makes the vendor choice secondary. We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service addressed storm-driven outage volumes using Schneider Electric ADMS integrated through Microsoft Azure. SDG&E built its wildfire and PSPS response on Oracle connected to AWS. In both cases, operational signals from detection through restoration flow into a shared event layer, so the status a customer sees reflects what is actually happening on the grid.

The results show up where customers feel them. Restoration estimates reached customers faster and with greater accuracy, proactive updates replaced silence as conditions changed, and the volume of "where is my power" calls into the contact center fell because people already had the answer. Most telling, the architecture proved itself during a real major storm, when load and stakes were highest.

Executives will leave with a clear view of how to treat outage communication as a strategic and reputational asset, how to reduce regulatory and brand risk, and how to make build-versus-buy decisions when no single product fits. Practitioners will take home a repeatable integration pattern, practical lessons on connecting ADMS and outage data to customer channels through an event layer, and a candid look at what broke and what held. The session closes with where AI heads next, including predictive restoration estimates, proactive personalization by customer segment, and AI-generated outage communications calibrated to event severity.