5 Takeaways from EEI 2026
My colleague and I were in Las Vegas last week for the EEI Conference 2026. The location seemed apt, because the stakes are high for energy and utilities, and those they serve. Who else was there? It was a bit of a who’s who in the space: executives from some of the key energy and technology companies on the spearhead of the Energy Transition. Entrepreneurs and vendors in everything from fusion to nuclear to software to cybersecurity. Federal and state government actors were there too.
Hot topics included: AI, cybersecurity, geopolitical threats, data centers, DERMS, and “the next industrial revolution is now.” Affordability was also on the lips of nearly every speaker.
A contingent of protesters who infiltrated one morning session spoke loudly and angrily about affordability too.
That’s the thing. The pace of change is — forgive the pun — beyond electric and forcing the industry to move, innovate, generate, and grow infrastructure, capabilities, interconnections, and people at an incredible pace.
Doing this, while developing a workforce and culture that is up to the task of ensuring a grid that is safe, reliable, affordable, equitable, and secure, means there’s a big job ahead for Utility leaders.
The New Industrial Revolution (With a Familiar Warning)
The speed and scale of electrification and the demands on the grid are unprecedented. But we’ve done hard things before. Electrification happened. The Interstate highway system was built. Large-scale infrastructure transformation is not new to this country.
What is new is the speed, the scale of the investment, the global interconnectedness, and the sheer volatility of this moment. Geopolitics are rocking international and national cooperation to already-challenged supply chains.
Utilities that were decommissioning plants five years ago are recommissioning them today. Retirees are being called back to work. Hyperscalers like Meta are spinning up new workforce training programs to fill a workforce pipeline that’s been underserved for decades. And a grid built over 100 years ago has to bridge the demand/viable supply gap.
Here’s a hard truth many of our clients are facing today: the technical and trade skills gap to keep up with this is real and large, and it’s not closing fast enough.
The harder truth: even with the right talent, most organizations aren’t structurally or culturally built for what comes next. That gap between the scale, the pace of change, and the human capacity to absorb it is the greatest bottleneck of our time.
Closing it is exactly the work we do at Kotter, and it’s the work that every organization and leader in this space needs to prioritize now. There’s a window of opportunity here. And, as one provocative customer noted, “If utilities don’t rise to the challenge, hyperscalers and others can go off grid. And even off earth.” Which brings a whole host of whole new challenges.
“The harder truth: even with the right talent, most organizations aren’t structurally or culturally built for what comes next. That gap between the scale, the pace of change, and the human capacity to absorb it is the greatest bottleneck of our time.”
What To Do? Five Things Every Utility Executive Should Be Wrestling With
1. Can your organization move at the speed of the technology? The leap from flat demand to AI-driven load growth is forcing a strategic pivot unlike anything the industry has experienced. The infrastructure can be built. The harder constraint is whether legacy organizational mindsets — built for stability, not velocity — can adapt fast enough to keep pace.
2. Are your legacy silos introducing risk you’re not fully accounting for? Organizational silos were cited consistently across the conference as a core threat — not just to strategy, but to execution and risk management. The modern grid requires genuine collaboration: internally across functions and externally with regulators, vendors, and supply chain partners. That doesn’t happen through org charts. It requires a deliberate cultural shift.
3. While speeding everything up, are you taking time to fix your processes before you automate them? Perhaps the most practical warning from EEI: you cannot automate your way out of broken processes. Deploying AI on top of dysfunction amplifies the dysfunction. Standardization is unsexy. It’s also non-negotiable. You have to go slow to go fast — and that requires a culture willing to let go of “how we’ve always done it.”
4. Do you have a workforce strategy or just a recruiting plan? The industry is facing an existential talent crisis on two fronts simultaneously: attracting the next generation while capturing the knowledge of the generation walking out the door. A hiring campaign won’t solve this. What’s required is rebranding utility work as the innovation career it actually is and building cultures where continuous learning is the operating norm, not the aspiration.
5. Are you telling the real story of opportunity, of challenges, and of the future state? Or are you just sharing the facts? There is a significant disconnect between the economic reality of what this build-out means for communities and what the public actually believes. Executives tend to treat this as an information deficit. It isn’t. It’s a trust problem, and trust is earned through narrative, not data. The industry needs a more compelling, unified story about why this moment matters and who it benefits.
Culture Is the Strategy
The technical blueprint for the energy transition is being written in real time. As demand suggests, technology is moving at a mind-boggling pace, and even policy, the notoriously slow blocker, is starting to pick up the pace. (Let’s not overstate it, but innovation is happening. Federal and state regulators are feeling the urgency of moving now…even if they’re not sure the best way forward.)
What isn’t keeping pace is the human side of transformation: the mindsets, the collaboration patterns, the change capability, the adaptability, and the engagement of customers, employees, partners, and vendors in very new ways. That has to happen if the sector is to actually execute at the speed and scale this moment requires.
That’s where Kotter’s work becomes directly relevant. If any of these five challenges live within your organization right now, let’s talk. We have over fifty years of experience helping organizations achieve incredible turnarounds and transformation.
And we know how to rally not just organizations and strategies, but people. People are the greatest asset any organization has, and the time to invest in them and in accelerating cultural transformation, is now.
Martha Deery is a Director at Kotter
