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Welcome to The Executive Exchange, a premier podcast series for on-the-go senior executives. Each episode features short, impactful podcasts where industry leaders share key insights and experiences from the water industry.
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and my guest today is John Ikeda, the Chief Mission Officer at the Water Environment Federation, or WEF, in Washington, the United States.
[00:00:20] Piers Clark: John, brilliant to have you with us.
[00:00:22] John Ikeda: Great to be here.
[00:00:23] Piers Clark: Now, we're gonna be talking about the Water AI nexus, and what it is that utility leaders around the world need to know if they're going to embrace AI in the water sector. But before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about your background.
[00:00:37] Piers Clark: Tell me, what did you study at university, and what did you do when you left university?
[00:00:41] John Ikeda: I actually studied journalism when I was in college. I wanted to tell people's stories, I wanted to travel around and do interesting things, and then took the logical step after that to go teach English in Japan.
[00:00:55] John Ikeda: And kind of like we say a lot of times at Water Environment Federation, water found me, I didn't find water.
[00:01:01] John Ikeda: So I actually came back when I was about 24 years old, did an MBA in finance. Wound up working in microfinance. Eventually went back to do a second master's degree in development economics and public policy, and then from there, was at the World Bank for about eight years. And it was there that I really found water.
[00:01:21] John Ikeda: You know, I had the opportunity to continue working in microfinance, developing the national microfinance policy for the government of Indonesia, and actually decided to pivot and instead focus on a rural water project also in Indonesia.
[00:01:34] John Ikeda: And from there, just absolutely fell in love with water.
[00:01:37] John Ikeda: And then left the bank to lead the water practice at a strategy consulting firm called Castalia. And couple of years ago, had the opportunity to come over to Water Environment Federation, and have been here ever since.
[00:01:50] Piers Clark: Wonderful.
[00:01:50] Piers Clark: Now, what does the Water Environment Federation do, and what does the Chief mission Officer in particular do at WEF?
[00:01:57] John Ikeda: So WEF is a leading voice for the water sector globally. We represent 31,000 water professionals around the globe through 75 member associations across the United States, Canada, and throughout the world.
[00:02:11] John Ikeda: You have utility leaders, engineering consulting firms, manufacturers, regulators, academics, young professionals. Anybody who's working in water has a place here at WEF. We're probably most famous for being the convener for WEFTEC, the largest annual water quality event in the world. But we have a number of different events, publications, online training. You know, our goal is to really be the place where people don't just come to meet and to be educated, but as our mission says to be inspired.
[00:02:45] John Ikeda: And that's really my job as the chief mission officer is be the champion for that mission of inspiring the water community to bring us towards a world where there's no water challenges. We're addressing public health, we're addressing environmental issues through our work as water professionals.
[00:03:03] John Ikeda: What I get to do as chief mission officer is all the fun stuff. You know, I lead our strategy. I lead our portfolio of technical programming. I get to work every day with our pool of volunteer experts who lead our different technical communities and just to be the connector that helps bring this all together.
[00:03:20] Piers Clark: So it's wonderful to hear that description because you're obviously not a utility chief executive, but you work with lots of utility people at a very senior level, and people who are just joining the industry, and it's people within the supply chain, it's people within the research institutions. And as you said there, the mission is let's make water better. Let's inspire people to change this water sector.
[00:03:43] Piers Clark: WEF has done very well and is hugely successful. As you mentioned, WEFTEC, I think, is the largest of its kind in the world, certainly in North America.
[00:03:52] Piers Clark: Now, what we wanna talk about today is AI and what that's doing to the water sector, and some of the WEF have been doing with your partners. So, first of all, describe the project and what its goals were.
[00:04:05] John Ikeda: One of the things we noticed pretty early on, as AI really started to take off a couple of years ago, is that there was a pretty big gap between the AI community and the water community. And so we wanted to use our position as a convener for the water sector to build closer bridges.
[00:04:23] John Ikeda: Not just looking at how AI is using water and how we can support the more sustainable use of water by data centers, by semiconductor manufacturers, but equally, if not more importantly, how do we channel this absolutely incredible, unprecedented, groundbreaking tool to solve some of the biggest, most complex water challenges that we have?
[00:04:45] John Ikeda: So we launched it last year at WEFTEC, in partnership with the other founding leaders. So that's University of Pennsylvania's Water Center, Amazon, and leading utilities of the world. You know, we very deliberately picked this group because it brings our perspective as an association, it brings in the academic perspective, it brings in the utility perspective, and it brings in the perspective of the hyperscalers.
[00:05:11] John Ikeda: And so since then, we've brought on a number of new organizations onto our advisory council representing the best of the water sector and bringing in the AI community as well, and really serving as a platform where these two groups can meet and develop collaborative solutions.
[00:05:28] Piers Clark: And how do we stop it from just being a talking shop?
[00:05:31] John Ikeda: It's anchored around this idea of insight reports, which is really important to us that what the center does is start to lay out what are the principles, what are the kind of ground rules for how AI and water work together.
[00:05:43] John Ikeda: And then from there, that leads to some very specific deliverables, you know, whether it's events and workshops or whether it's technical guidance on things like wastewater reuse for data center cooling or use cases for utilities, like specific examples of how they can incorporate AI into their work.
[00:06:02] John Ikeda: The insight reports are really the core of all of this. So the first one we launched was around the sustainable use of water by data centers, and it's laying out that you need to be thinking about the design upfront. That you're taking into account the hydrology, the climate, the energy mix on the grid, all of these things as you're designing the data centers, so that you're optimizing the balance between water and energy use.
[00:06:25] John Ikeda: But also that you're looking into reuse for cooling and that you're engaging with the communities proactively. We have a second insight report we launched a few months ago looking at how utilities can use AI to improve efficiency to support workers rather than replace them.
[00:06:43] John Ikeda: And so, these are the core principles that we're asking all of the partners that are involved with the center to sign on to. So it's creating this common voice that, both AI and water are committing to.
[00:06:55] John Ikeda: And so the next insight report we're looking at is to delve a little bit deeper into that exact question of water versus energy trade-offs.
[00:07:04] John Ikeda: In the US at least, water's use in data centers is a pretty contentious issue right now. And so what we wanna do with the center is provide a common set of facts and a common way of thinking about this and a common way of measuring it because it's very easy to say that a data center is not using any water in the cooling process. But if it's using very energy-intensive processes instead, unless the grid mix is fully renewable, the indirect water use could be much, much greater.
[00:07:35] Piers Clark: And tell me how are you going to be confident you've been successful?
[00:07:40] John Ikeda: I think we're successful when we see on the water into AI side that reuse is seen as the default way of cooling data centers. That you're starting to see intelligent zoning that tries to place data centers around wastewater treatment plants to facilitate reuse and that you're seeing a common way of measuring water use efficiency across different hyperscalers, across different regulators. And that water is seen as an enabler for data center development, but also a way to help build America's water infrastructure.
[00:08:17] John Ikeda: On the AI side, I think it's really that we've clearly articulated these are the opportunities for AI, and to create a real market signal that utilities need these areas of support. They're looking for operator co-pilots, an LLM that can advise the operator in real time as they're doing maintenance.
[00:08:37] Piers Clark: I like that message you gave earlier of it's about using AI to facilitate the existing workforce, not necessarily replace them.
[00:08:45] John Ikeda: Exactly. We wanna get ahead of that.
[00:08:47] John Ikeda: In the short term, we know there's gonna be disruption in labor markets. And utilities are probably insulated from some of that. Physical labor is less likely to be outsourced until robotics has a real step change in improvement in what it's able to do. And additionally, I think, the fact that operators are licensed, the fact that there's going to be likely, public pushback on the idea of a fully automated utility.
[00:09:13] John Ikeda: But, you know, we're anticipating that at some point in time, regulators, policymakers, voters are gonna be asking, "Labor is one of the biggest line items at any utility. Why aren't you using AI to just cut labor costs?" which is the wrong approach, particularly in an industry where we're struggling to attract people to serve in these operator roles in the first place.
[00:09:32] John Ikeda: So, how do we use AI to make operators more efficient, to make their jobs more enjoyable, so they spend more time doing the parts of their job they like, and less parts of the job that, you know, involve paperwork-
[00:09:45] Piers Clark: A transactional. Yeah, transactional stuff.
[00:09:46] John Ikeda: Exactly.
[00:09:48] Piers Clark: I maybe a bit old school. Once you start putting a spade in the ground, you enter into a whole world of unknown stuff. You don't know what hidden infrastructure's down there. And getting robots to fix holes in the ground, for example, I just don't think it's ever gonna happen. Maybe I'll be proven wrong but I think what we can do is use AI to do a lot of the planning, get a lot of the reactive maintenance turned into reactive responses turned into planned maintenance.
[00:10:14] Piers Clark: Like you say make the operators more efficient so that they do the things they're good at and not the things that maybe they're less good at.
[00:10:22] John Ikeda: Exactly. And one of the things I try to encourage people to do is to think about in an unconstrained world, what could we do? If you had the ability through agentic AI to analyze, to make decisions, what does that open up?
[00:10:35] John Ikeda: As a utility manager, if you knew every single tap, every single toilet in the entire city, every gallon of water that's being used and where it's going, if you knew the water quality of every drop- What could be done with that information? How much more efficient and effective could service delivery be with perfect information, right?
[00:10:56] John Ikeda: And we're just at the very beginning stages of this. And if you think about where ChatGPT was a few years ago and where it is today, the rate of change is only increasing.
[00:11:08] John Ikeda: And so there's an unbelievable amount of potential, but we need to create those market signals to encourage innovation from AI companies, and it may not happen organically. And part of that is because there's not those connections with the broader AI community, and we're great in water at talking to each other, and we're less great about building those connections with other sectors.
[00:11:31] Piers Clark: Excellent. All right. Well, that's fabulous. Now, I understand you actually have set up a course which will enable utility personnel and executives to get more familiar with this.
[00:11:42] John Ikeda: So we launched a course recently called AI 101 for Water Professionals that walks through both the sustainable water principles, how do data centers work, how do they use water, what do you need to know as a utility manager if a data center's coming to your community.
[00:11:59] John Ikeda: The basics of AI, the different flavors of it from predictive modeling, to LLMs, to agentic AI. Some basic guidance on how to write a good query, how to use it effectively, and also the sort of ethics and guardrails around it. And so this gives people the fundamentals for that.
And hopefully, particularly for utility leaders, starts to spark broader transformation initiatives to use it at the organizational level. But it's set up where anybody can take the two-hour course that's completely free, and then apply it in their day-to-day work immediately afterwards.
[00:12:34] Piers Clark: So it's a 2-hour course, online, available to anyone inside or outside the United States?
[00:12:40] John Ikeda: Correct. And it's part of what we're trying to do with the Water AI Nexus and help provide these kind of resources for the water sector, and it's available at water-ai-nexus.org and it's under the resources page. And we have a number of different videos, reports. We want this to be the hub for anything water and AI related.
[00:13:02] Piers Clark: Brilliant. What a great aspiration. John, we're running out of time. And I'd like you to answer the question: if we had a time machine, and you could go back 40 years back to a young John who was trying to work out, "What am I gonna do?"
[00:13:16] Piers Clark: What advice would you give him?
[00:13:18] John Ikeda: Well, if I was going back 40 years, I would tell seven-year-old John, don't be a paleontologist. You should look at water. It's much more interesting than dinosaurs.
[00:13:29] John Ikeda: If I went a little closer to the future, I'd probably tell myself, there's no perfect answer. I, honestly, I think, spent a lot of time as an individual contributor trying to find that one perfect elegant answer, and I think as I've taken on more of a managerial role or taken on, you know, senior leadership roles, you realize there is no answer, and it really is about the process of creating consensus, of bringing people around to create a solution that has broad buy-in, and that's how you make real change.
Bringing it back to the center, I think that's what we're trying to do. I don't know what AI's gonna look like in two years. Nobody does. We don't know how data center cooling technologies are gonna evolve. We don't know what community engagement on this is gonna look like. But by bringing people together, we can co-create those sort of solutions.
[00:14:20] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been John Ikeda, the Chief Mission Officer at the Water Environment Federation, and don't tell me you don't get anything from these Exec Exchange podcasts.
You've just been directed to a brilliant free course that will teach you all you need to know, at least for the first couple of rungs of the ladder, about AI in the water space.
[00:14:43] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.