Enhancing Grid Reliability: How Buzz Solutions Uses Vision AI to Prevent Outages and Wildfires - Ep. 249

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Buzz Solutions is on a mission to enhance the safety and efficiency of the electric grid through innovative data analytics and machine learning. A member of NVIDIA's inception program for startups, Buzz's visual intelligence empowers utility companies to better monitor and manage their infrastructure. The result is improved reliability and reduced outages. Here to explain how Buzz does it and to talk about the impact AI can have on making our electric grids safer and more robust is Caitlin Albertoli, CEO and cofounder of Buzz Solutions. Caitlin, welcome, and thanks so much for joining the NVIDIA AI podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Noah. I'm excited to be here. So we're two, Californians, and, And, I mean, I think it's everywhere now, but certainly in our state, the electric grid has been a source of news for quite some time now. It's something that's on lots of people's minds. So, I'm very excited to learn more about what Buzz is doing and, the impact that AI can have going forward to really help all of us because we all use electricity. Right? So maybe we can get into it with a little bit about your background and how you came to cofound Buzz Solutions. Absolutely. Thanks for the question. Happy to share. So we launched Buzz Solutions from a Launchpad course at Stanford University in the 2017. My background is actually not from the electric and power industry. Prior to Buzz, I was working in finance and I also ran a nonprofit in the sustainable food world. Before that, I I grew up in Southern California in a town that was, close to the nuclear power plant, the San Onofre Power Plant. So that was really my first exposure to, the power world, the power industry. It was actually shut down during the time that I was living in Southern California. So that was an interesting, dynamic to, you know, grow up with and see. Yeah. Did that leave an impression on you? I mean, did it did you think more about where power comes from than perhaps, you know, the the average kid? Definitely. It definitely got me thinking more about our different generation sources and renewable energy more broadly. Yeah. And so when I went into Stanford, I was certainly looking for more opportunities to learn about about generation and and power as a whole. That's great. So there's a lot of steps on the way as as you mentioned with, you know, finance and sustainable food. But how did you wind up, cofounding Buzz? How did Buzz come to be? Sure. So, my cofounder, Vic, and I met in this Launchpad course that was in the school of civil and environmental engineering. Okay. It was about building a start up in the school of civil and environmental engineering focused on energy and sustainability. Yeah. And there was something that called me to this …