Bryan Sacks

About Bryan:

Bryan Sacks, technology leader in IBM’s Utility Industry, works closely with clients to tackle energy transition challenges through technology innovation. He has deep expertise in artificial intelligence, asset lifecycle management and grid resilience.  In his 25+ year within the energy industry, Bryan has held various roles in technology leadership (global CTO), consulting, architecture and offering management. Bryan is also the founder of an international collaboration to build a foundation model for the power grid and led the creation of a geospatial AI solution for vegetation management.

Breakout Session 4: 2:45pm – 3:45pm

Topic: Advanced AI in Critical Infrastructure

Large Language Models (LLMs) have accelerated the adoption of AI across many disciplines, yet their text centric design limits applicability to engineering systems governed by physical laws, constraints, and risk. Across engineering domains there is growing interest in foundation models trained on physics based data rather than language alone.

This presentation introduces the GridFM initiative as a concrete example of this approach for power systems. GridFM is a global collaboration to build a foundation model trained directly on grid data, enabling generalizable representations of complex system behavior across operating conditions and configurations.

The presentation also highlights the critical need for security and governance as foundation models are deployed in the design and operation of critical infrastructure.