Air Space Intelligence and National Grid Collaborate to Deploy Operational AI to the Electric Grid

BOSTON, May 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Air Space Intelligence (ASI), a pioneer in AI for the world's most demanding operational domains, today announced a collaboration with National Grid, one of the largest electric and gas utilities in the United States, to deliver AI-powered decision support for electric grid planning and operations. The effort will apply ASI's predictive modeling and scenario optimization capabilities to a range of critical grid challenges, including resilience planning, outage detection, and energy storage deployment, helping reduce costs and time in the field.

"The electric grid is one of the most complex systems in the world, and the decisions utilities face are only getting harder," said Phillip Buckendorf, CEO and Co-Founder of ASI. "ASI has spent years building advanced AI technology for mission-critical operational environments–including aviation, logistics, and defense–and we're proud to partner with National Grid to bring those same capabilities to support the critical infrastructure that powers everyday life."

"As the electric grid becomes more complex, data and advanced analytics play an increasingly important role in how we plan and operate the system," said John Franklin, VP of National Grid New England Network Management. "ASI's action-oriented AI tools will help us leverage existing and new grid related data to inform decisions, allowing us to respond more effectively to emerging challenges."

The electric grid faces a period of unprecedented complexity. Surging demand, extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and the rapid proliferation of distributed energy resources are fundamentally changing how power is delivered, creating new challenges to maintain reliability, affordability, and efficiency.

To help National Grid address these hurdles, ASI will fuse grid topology, asset, reliability, outage, forecasting, geospatial, and environmental data into a continuously updated predictive world model of the grid. From this foundation, ASI's AI autonomously generates, evaluates, and optimizes across millions of planning scenarios, surfacing actionable recommendations that can help grid operators and planners act faster and with greater efficiency, helping reduce costs across the system and delivering enhanced reliability for customers.

The collaboration will initially focus on several high-impact areas: optimizing the siting and interconnection of distributed energy resources, enabling scenario-based resilience planning for extreme weather and demand surges, and outage mapping capabilities. Across each, ASI's AI platform will provide probabilistic assessments and recommendations, helping planners and operators navigate the growing complexity of a rapidly evolving grid.

The partnership between ASI and National Grid is supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center's Innovate Mass program, a state initiative that promotes "technologies with a strong potential for commercialization," including a special focus on innovative "Gridtech" demonstration projects.  

About Air Space Intelligence
Air Space Intelligence powers critical decision-making in the most demanding operational domains, from air traffic management to defense logistics. ASI's AI platform already manages over 40% of all US air traffic at major airlines like Alaska, Delta, and United and supports live operations for the US Air Force. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz and other top investors, ASI is a fast-moving technology company at the forefront of operational AI.

Media Contact: [email protected] 

About National Grid
National Grid (NYSE: NGG) in the U.S. delivers electricity and natural gas to more than 20 million people across New York and Massachusetts. We're committed to meeting our customers' energy needs and supporting economic growth across the regions we serve—providing safe, reliable energy today and building the resilient networks of the future. National Grid Ventures, our commercial business, develops and operates infrastructure that delivers affordable and reliable energy to consumers. National Grid Partners, our venture capital and corporate innovation arm, invests in and collaborates with technology companies that are accelerating the future of energy and helping new technologies reach critical scale faster.

Media Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Air Space Intelligence