GridUnity Launches the GridUnity Intelligence Lab to Accelerate "The Era of Governed AI Interconnection and Grid Planning"

New Innovation Lab enables safe experimentation with AI for efficient collaboration across transmission and distribution stakeholders

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- GridUnity, the leading provider of modern interconnection and grid planning solutions, today announced the launch of the GridUnity Intelligence Lab (GIL), a dedicated innovation lab designed to scale AI agents on real utility data—quickly, responsibly, and with humans-in-the-loop. GIL will accelerate the adoption of purpose-built AI to address challenges in the electrical grid.

The GridUnity Intelligence Lab (GIL) is GridUnity's customer co-creation ecosystem that accelerates industry innovation by leveraging a secure sandbox with access to GALE AI, the Grid Analytics Learning Engine. GALE is built on a master data model of the physical grid to deliver trusted, expert-level answers to utility teams navigating accelerating load growth and growing interconnection complexity.

"Utilities and stakeholders need more than generic AI—they need governed intelligence grounded in the realities of the grid," said Brian Fitzsimons, CEO at GridUnity. "With the GridUnity Intelligence Lab, we're providing a safe and powerful ecosystem for transmission and distribution system operators to collaborate and deploy AI, build trust, and deploy role-based agents that support and amplify—rather than supplant—human expertise."

Why the Intelligence Lab, and why now

As interconnection and large load connection volumes surge—and regulatory scrutiny intensifies—utilities need tools that deliver secure transparency, readiness, and accountable decision support to close the growing intelligence gap.

This moment demands a different operating model.

For decades, the industry has engaged in collaborative research structures intended to drive progress, yet research without commercially intended outcomes has led to timelines that fail to deliver real-world solutions to challenges such as queue backlogs, rising stakeholder expectations, and compressed planning cycles. The AI wave both amplifies the gap in practical solutions and provides tools to close it. The grid can't afford innovation that arrives on "research time." It needs rapid ideation, rapid validation, and rapid delivery—without compromising safety, reliability, or governance.

Unlike generic AI systems that lack access to critical infrastructure data (and can't be trusted to reason over it), GridUnity's approach is governed AI: decision compression with explainable outputs, grounded in real foundational data and wrapped in a controlled environment for collaborative validation before anything reaches production. The Intelligence Lab is where utilities and operators can test ideas, pressure-test assumptions, and prove value quickly—turning community collaboration into measurable progress rather than multi-year waiting cycles.

GIL is designed to staff and support this new pace: a modern lab that becomes the industry's go-to ecosystem for community-driven collaboration, rapid development, and breakthrough innovation—built for the urgency of now.

Introducing GALE AI: grid-native, governed, and role-based

GALE AI is GridUnity's grid-native AI, built for system operators, transmission owners and utility use cases where trust, permissioning, and auditability matter. GALE is built on a master data model of the physical grid to provide trusted, expert-level answers. It's pre-trained on grid standards, mandates, and regulatory guidelines and continuously tuned to each utility's grid model and operating practices.

GALE runs on foundational interconnection and planning data, enabled by GridUnity solutions such as GridInterConnect and GridSync, to capture lifecycle data and curate it into a system of intelligence. This system improves transparency and readiness and connects systems of record with systems of intelligence, enabling stakeholders to collaborate across diverse roles and entities.

The GridUnity Intelligence Lab is in the process of actively rolling out to GridUnity's existing customers as founding cohort members and will be announced shortly.

Available now

The GridUnity Intelligence Lab is officially launching today to GridUnity customers—utilities, transmission providers, and transmission owners serving over half of the US for early innovation, accelerating the development, testing, and scaling of new AI agents and use cases on real utility data, safely and quickly.

Learn more at https://www.gridunity.com/lab

About GridUnity
GridUnity^® accelerates grid interconnection by streamlining and automating complex, manual processes that delay energy deployment. We help utilities, transmission owners, system operators, and developers collaborate more effectively and engage all system participants in generation and load interconnection at the bulk-power and distribution system levels. GridUnity's curated data approach and intelligently applied AI changes today's Interconnection process to tomorrow's Intelligent-connection process. Trusted by North America's leading utilities and system operators, GridUnity customers serve over 50% of the U.S. population. For more information, visit gridunity.com and follow GridUnity on LinkedIn.

Press contact:
Helen Fairman
[email protected]
(978)410-9111

SOURCE GridUnity