Insights from the 2026 Executive Leadership Forum

The global power landscape is undergoing a transformation that is as rapid as it is profound. As the industry moves deeper into 2026, utilities and industrial operators find themselves at a critical crossroads – balancing aging infrastructure, unprecedented load growth, and the accelerating demands of a digital, electrified economy. Reliability is no longer a background function; it has become a strategic imperative.

Against this backdrop, the 2026 Executive Leadership Forum convened senior leaders from across the reliability and asset management ecosystem to reflect on the past year and define priorities for the future. Martin Robinson, Founder and CEO of IRISS; Angelo Rizzo, President and CEO of Systems With Intelligence; and Jon Bucciarelli, President of SDMyers, offered candid insights into a sector grappling with workforce attrition, rising risk, and the transformative promise of artificial intelligence.

Their discussion revealed an industry in transition – one increasingly defined by resilience, collaboration, and the convergence of human expertise with intelligent systems.

Reflections on 2025: Growth Driven by Resilience

Across the panel, leaders agreed that 2025 surpassed even optimistic expectations. Growth was not only financial but structural, reshaping how customers define value and
success.

For IRISS, the year marked a significant expansion in both scale and global reach. Martin Robinson described it plainly as a “massive growth year,” noting that the company now has “boots on the ground in all continents.” Yet the most important shift, he explained, was not geographic – it was philosophical.

“I found that the big driver for our messaging revolved around resilience and sustainability more than safety and reliability.”

This distinction signals a deeper change in customer mindset. Reliability, once viewed as the baseline expectation, is now part of a broader conversation about systems that can withstand disruption, recover quickly, and adapt to long-term uncertainty. Clients are no longer asking whether systems will fail, but how well they will endure.

At Systems With Intelligence, Angelo Rizzo described a similarly strong year, driven by deeper partnerships and the deployment of intelligence directly into the field. Central to that progress was the continued evolution of the company’s Intellinspect platform.

“As a company, we made some significant progress on our Intellinspect platform, bringing AI-enabled inspection and analytics into the harsh substation environments, augmenting
our industry-leading thermal capabilities with deeper insights.”

This shift – from data capture to intelligent interpretation – reflects a broader industry demand. Utilities want more to go along with the data; they want clarity, context, and confidence in decision-making.

For SD Myers, which recently marked its 60th anniversary, 2025 reinforced a long-held belief that sustainable growth must be grounded in people. Jon Bucciarelli emphasized that while metrics and market expansion matter, the company’s deeper purpose remains unchanged.

“We plan for growth because we know the things that are taking place in the market,” Bucciarelli explained. “It seems like despite our best efforts to plan for those things, we never can plan for it growing as fast as it’s growing. And so the needs of customers continue to outpace.”

That accelerating demand, he noted, is forcing organizations to rethink not only how fast they grow, but how thoughtfully they do so.

The Macro Shift: Rising Risk, Limited Resources

Looking beyond individual company performance, the forum addressed the broader forces reshaping the power sector. Aging assets, soaring electricity demand, and constrained human resources are converging into what many described as a perfect storm.

Rizzo captured the dynamic succinctly.

“What we’re seeing in the industry is the widening gap between asset risk and available resources.”

As infrastructure ages and loads increase – driven largely by data centers, electrification, and industrial expansion – utilities are being asked to do more with less. This imbalance is accelerating the move away from fragmented tools toward unified platforms.

Customers want fewer tools, better data, and insights that they can trust in the substation environment.

Angelo Rizzo

“We’re seeing a clear shift away from point technologies towards integrated inspection and monitoring platforms,” Rizzo said. “Customers want fewer tools, better data, and insights that they can trust in the substation environment.”

Bucciarelli highlighted another pressure point: access to critical equipment. With power demand projected to triple by 2030, competition for transformers and key components is intensifying.

“The Magnificent Seven is cornering the market on power transformers,” he noted “and it’s getting more and more challenging for the smaller industrials and our customers down the street who have a single transformer to even be in that game.”

In such an environment, diligent maintenance is no longer optional. It is one of the few levers organizations can control to extend asset life and mitigate risk – especially as new market entrants arrive without decades of institutional knowledge.

The Workforce Crisis and the Rise od AI-Assisted Humans

No challenge loomed larger in the discussion than the accelerating retirement of experienced engineers and technicians – the so-called “Silver Tsunami.”

Robinson did not downplay the severity: “It’s decimating our skill sets.”

No matter how much skill you got in the game, the AI assistance will only make you better and protect you and give you information at point of source.

Martin Robinson

With thousands of skilled workers leaving the workforce each day, the industry faces a widening knowledge gap. The solution, the panel agreed, is not replacing people with machines, but equipping the next generation with intelligent support.

“We came to the conclusion that AI-assisted humans will be far more productive than just a standard human being,” Robinson said. “No matter how much skill you got in the game, the AI assistance will only make you better and protect you and give you information at point of source.”

For Robinson, AI becomes a digital extension of experience – guiding decisions, reducing errors, and embedding best practices directly into daily workflows. IRISS is already bringing this philosophy into technical colleges, teaching students how to operate in environments where AI is a trusted companion rather than a threat.

Bucciarelli echoed this perspective, emphasizing that SDMyers views AI as a tool for enrichment, not replacement.

“Our desire is not to replace people with AI,” he said. “Our desire is to utilize AI in such a way that allows people to have a more fulfilling job, be able to increase their knowledge, increase their skills so that they can do more for the customer, for themselves, for the organization.”

In an industry built on expertise, fulfillment and retention may prove just as important as recruitment.

Strategic Priorities for 2026: From Periodic to Continuous

As the discussion turned toward 2026, each leader outlined ambitious initiatives designed to redefine how reliability is achieved.

For Systems With Intelligence, the goal is a fundamental shift in how risk is managed.

“Our big initiative is meaningfully reducing the risk of catastrophic failure,” Rizzo explained. “And that means moving from periodic inspections to continuous health monitoring that is intelligently driving awareness, so that issues are identified long before any big events happen.”

Central to this vision is remote, touchless inspection – reducing unnecessary field visits, improving productivity, and minimizing exposure to hazardous environments.

At SD Myers, Bucciarelli identified AI-driven diagnostics and digital integration as key priorities, paired with a renewed emphasis on customer education.

“I think our customers need to be educated on the risks that exist with their electric power systems.”

For him, awareness is the foundation of resilience. When customers understand their risk profile, maintenance shifts from a cost center to a strategic investment – one that quietly enables everything else to function.

Redefining Trust and Collaboration

One of the most striking themes of the forum was the industry’s return to trust-based relationships. After years of transactional procurement and skepticism toward vendors, engineering expertise is once again being valued as advisory.

Robinson argued that language itself plays a role in this transformation.

“I’ve never heard a board member say, I don’t want to be reliable. I want to be less reliable, not more reliable.”

By reframing maintenance professionals as reliability practitioners, organizations elevate the conversation from cost containment to value creation. Post-COVID realities, Robinson noted, have accelerated this shift, allowing firms to move beyond being perceived as vendors to becoming trusted resources.

Bucciarelli extended this collaborative mindset beyond customers to include designers and even competitors.

We want to see people flourish, which includes our employees, our customers, and even our competitors, because we think that when that’s happening in this space, the space will be better for it, more reliable, safer.

Jon Bucciarelli

“We want to see people flourish, which includes our employees, our customers, and even our competitors, because we think that when that’s happening in this space, the space will be better for it, more reliable, safer.”

Designing for maintainability from the outset – through infrared windows, smart gauges, and digital access – becomes a shared responsibility across the ecosystem.

Preparing for the Unknown

As the forum concluded, attention turned to the risks that cannot be fully predicted – geopolitical instability, extreme weather, and supply-chain disruption.

For Rizzo, resilience begins with culture.

“Our culture and the whole existence of our company is based on a can-do attitude,” he said, “and it starts with teaching the young engineers to have an open mind and to have an approach that maybe we don’t have the answer right now, but we’re going to figure out a way.”

That mindset, shared across organizations, may be the most powerful risk-mitigation tool of all.

Conclusion

The 2026 Executive Leadership Forum made one reality unmistakably clear: the energy sector is no longer defined solely by electrons and equipment. It is defined by people, intelligence, and the systems that connect them.

As leaders at IRISS, SDMyers, and Systems With Intelligence look ahead, their focus is not just growth, but durability—building organizations, technologies, and relationships capable of withstanding an uncertain future. For the industry at large, the message is equally clear: resilience is no longer optional, and reliability is no longer silent. It is strategic.