Hitachi Digital Services and Jacobs transform water management with AI

Enterprise leaders face a growing and complex imperative: navigating resource scarcity and climate change while ensuring operational efficiency and sustainability. In water management, this challenge is particularly critical. Effective management of water assets is necessary not only for environmental stewardship but also for maintaining the infrastructure that is vital for business continuity.

Hitachi, in collaboration with Jacobs Solutions Inc., is addressing this need through AI-enabled solutions that can transform water management practices. Their jointly built flagship project, Dragonfly℠, exemplifies how turning big data into actionable insights can drive efficiency, consistency, and sustainability.

Dragonfly—revolutionizing the inspection of sewage and storm drainpipes by automating the analysis of inspection videos

Traditionally, this process required manual review, with inspectors scoring each frame against industry standards. Such methods were labor-intensive and prone to inconsistencies and inefficiencies. The challenges were elements that typically limited utilities to only inspect 10% of their networks annually.

Dragonfly tackles these issues by using AI to automate the identification and coding of defects in sewer inspection videos and provide prescriptive asset management guidance based on the defect coding. The automation also provides guidance for recommended maintenance activities, schedules, and estimated costs. By identifying the pipes that need immediate attention and those that can be scheduled for future inspection, asset owners get the necessary guidance to operate their systems efficiently. The solution frees utility staff to focus on critical tasks by delivering actionable and predictive insights while ensuring that reliable data guides infrastructure maintenance.

Collaboration exemplifies the shift toward purpose-driven service relationships

The relationship between Hitachi and Jacobs is purpose-driven, as both parties aim to leverage AI for societal impact and environmental sustainability. The companies are focused on driving shared outcomes that benefit communities and enhance infrastructure resilience, exemplifying Stage 3 of service relationship maturity (see Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1: To ensure success, service relationships need to evolve from effort to purpose driven

Source: HFS Research, 2024

Partnership is driven by a shared commitment to creating a significant impact through advanced technological solutions

While the partnership was initially intended to enhance inspection efficiency and productivity, it has surpassed this goal by making a significant societal and environmental impact. It exemplifies the true value of AI capabilities in driving new value creation that many enterprises strive to achieve but often miss by getting caught in the productivity trap.

By developing tools such as Dragonfly, Hitachi and Jacobs drive new value by:

• Enhancing community resilience: Dragonfly played a crucial role in the path to recovery from the Lahaina wildfires in Maui. By quickly analyzing inspection videos, it helped assess infrastructure readiness for returning residents, ensuring safety, and accelerating the recovery process. This showcases the solution’s capability to provide rapid, actionable insights in emergencies, directly benefiting communities.
• Addressing regulatory and environmental challenges: Utilities often face stringent regulatory requirements that can strain budgets. Dragonfly helps meet these demands by providing accurate data for compliance, enabling utilities to allocate resources more efficiently.
• Promoting sustainability: Dragonfly contributes to broader environmental goals by optimizing water management. It also provides efficient maintenance schedules and aligns with global sustainability efforts. This drives long-term environmental sustainability, enhancing utilities’ overall value proposition.

Looking ahead, the collaboration aims to expand Dragonfly’s applications into other sectors and geographies. For example, the solution could be used to inspect city infrastructure, rail transport security, pipelines and substations, rental fleet vehicles, and assist with disaster recovery infrastructure readiness.

Developing Dragonfly—not without challenges

Training the AI algorithm required a curated dataset and continuous human oversight to ensure accuracy. At the start of the project, people had to spend a significant amount of time labeling the data accurately. Alongside having a human-in-the-loop approach to inspections, the partnership further leveraged Jacobs’ extensive domain expertise and past data to refine the algorithm, enabling them to achieve 95% accuracy.

However, this approach means that as Dragonfly expands to new industries and use cases, it will demand significant domain expertise and time to categorize and annotate data accurately.

The Bottom Line: Enterprise leaders in the water sector are at a crossroads, making the adoption of AI-based solutions pivotal.

The future of water lies in actionable data, and Hitachi and Jacobs are leading the way to make this a reality. Solutions such as Dragonfly demonstrate that proactive approaches are essential for addressing the challenges of climate change and resource scarcity.