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National Grid : and Keen AI Develop Britain’s First Shared AI System for the Grid
National Grid : and Keen AI Develop Britain’s First Shared AI System for the
About this update from National Grid Plc
National Grid and Keen AI have secured Alpha-phase funding from the Strategic Innovation Fund, an Ofgem programme managed in partnership with Innovate UK, to develop Foundational Shared Model Operations (FoSMo), Britain's first collaborative AI system for asset management across the electricity network. FoSMo is a shared AI model that standardises how electricity network operators collect, analyse and act on visual data from their physical assets. The £355,985 Alpha award follows the successful completion of the project's discovery phase, which proved the concept across participating networks. The Alpha phase brings together all three of Great Britain's electricity transmission operators - National Grid (lead partner), SP Energy Networks and SSEN Transmission - alongside distribution operators UK Power Networks and Electricity North West. Rather than each operator building its own detection tools in isolation, FoSMo allows the pooling of anonymised data from across the industry to create a single, continuously improving foundational model that any participating UK operator can use. Opportunity for greater collaboration in an interconnected network The UK's electricity network physically operates as a single interconnected system, yet the AI used to monitor it is being built individually. Operators share many of the same components - pylons, cables, insulators, fittings - which all encounter similar asset health challenges. Defects and components are rare, meaning a single operator may not have enough examples to train a robust model. The lack of shared knowledge forces each operator to develop its own detection tool from scratch, duplicating effort and delaying the identification of high-risk assets. A shared foundation FoSMo addresses this by standardising data collection and analysis across the industry, creating a shared foundation model that any participant can fine-tune for its own network. The model draws on anonymised datasets contributed by participating operators, made available under a permissive licence at no further cost. Keen AI, having already processed over one billion images for its UK electricity transmission and distribution customers, will serve as the technical steward responsible for developing, maintaining and hosting the models in the UK. By pooling data across the industry, FoSMo is projected to produce more accurate models than an...