Georges Gonzalez shares how a water utility in Florida is testing AI tools to improve workflows.
After emigrating from Cuba to the U.S. at age ten, Georges Gonzalez struggled to find his voice and his passion. It took joining the Civil Air Patrol and, later, the Air Force to boost his confidence and instill a work ethic he’d carry with him for years.
He began his post-military career as a delivery driver for Coca-Cola, where he quickly moved up the ranks. But after working for the company for more than a decade, Georges took a buy-out in 2015. Before long, he was on to his next adventure, working in the water utility sector, starting in Pinellas County in west-central Florida. Today, he’s the director of enterprise solutions for water resources in nearby Hillsborough County, Florida.
This week on With Great Power, Georges talks about how his team is evaluating AI tools for improving its customer service representative training, among other functions. Georges explains the county government’s careful approach to using artificial intelligence, how department staff have reacted to it, and how the water resources team is testing the technology.
Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley: Georges Gonzalez and his family immigrated to Miami from Cuba in 1980. He was just 10 years old at the time, so it was a big adjustment. One of his challenges was struggling to learn English.
Georges Gonzalez: It took me a very long time to realize, okay, I have to learn English. I have to get better. I wanted to get rid of my accent.
Brad Langley: He was a bit of a heavyset kid too. So to feel more confident and fit, he joined a group called the Civil Air Patrol.
Georges Gonzalez: When I met with them, they were like, "Oh, we could help you lose some weight because we're going to do some running and we're going to do some traveling," which I loved. I liked the military.
Brad Langley: It made sense then that after a high school stint in the Air Force arm of the junior ROTC, he went ahead and joined the Air Force.
Georges Gonzalez: The Air Force really taught me not only to care for the job, but really give it your all and go for it. Don't be afraid. And that really changed my life, honestly. After I left the military, that's what drove me.
Brad Langley: But driving itself was actually what started Georges's post-military career back in Miami.
Georges Gonzalez: I was a delivery driver at Coca-Cola. I was the guy that cleaned the shelves and put the Coke bottles on the shelf. We didn't have computers and we would jot down what we sold and what we delivered every day.
Brad Langley: Soon he was climbing his way up the corporate ladder at Coca-Cola.
Georges Gonzalez: I would volunteer for everything I could because I was hungry. I wanted to learn. I wanted to grow. And that was my approach and it really worked out for me because from there there was another promotion and then another one and then another one.
Brad Langley: Until there wasn't. In 2015, Coca-Cola announced it was offering buyouts. Georges didn't really want to leave the company and at 47 he wasn't yet ready to retire. But the buyout … it made just too much economic sense. Plus, he knew he'd be leaving with lots of transferable experience in finance and customer support roles. The next year during a volunteer shift at the local Veterans Affairs Hospital, a door opened that led him to his second career in the water utility sector.
Georges Gonzalez: One of the directors there said, "Pinellas County is looking for somebody with your experience and they want somebody from the outside, you should go and take a look at it."
Brad Langley: So he did. And after five years in Pinellas and a short stint in Minnesota, today Georges is the director of Enterprise Solutions for Water Resources in Hillsborough County, Florida.
Georges Gonzalez: We are 0% taxpayer funded. We're an enterprise just like a private business within a government entity. So my team, we handle all of the budget. We handle all the customer calls that are coming in. We do a lot of town halls. We do a lot of community involvement and water conservation here. In Florida these days, we're in a very heavy drought at the moment. I've made it a point to really learn what is happening in the industry and then we bring it here and we try to put it in place.
Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change. That they don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and customer centric. In this episode, we're broadening out a bit to look at how a water utility is integrating new technology into its operations. My guest is Georges Gonzalez, Director of Enterprise Solutions for Water Resources in Hillsborough County, Florida. I met Georges at an industry conference earlier this year where we spoke about how the water utility is looking to AI to help streamline and improve its call center onboarding.
Georges Gonzalez: We had training on OneNote. We had training on Word documents. We had training on PowerPoint. So we have training all over the place, but it really wasn't succinct. It wasn't a very clear training path.
Brad Langley: So to help chart that path, they brought in a startup called Power Connect AI, which makes customer service tools for the utility sector. I asked Georges to describe what he was looking for and how he connected with Power Connect AI founder, Steve Dawson.
Georges Gonzalez: So I wanted a company that was nimble. It didn't require a whole lot of red tape. I already had that here. When I shared with him the concerns that I had, he sent me a message saying, "Hey, look, I went out and made a copy of your website and here's what I've got for you." They were able to put it all in a package, fairly affordable. That was the other thing that could rapidly be implemented. And we're working on several projects that are coming to pilot here in the next month or so. It's really industry changing really.
Brad Langley: Knowing that AI is a bit of a lightning rod within many companies and utilities and government institutions, I'm curious, how did your cybersecurity and IT teams react when you brought up the idea of testing an AI tool?
Georges Gonzalez: So the first answer was no, we're not doing that. Hey, so that was very clear from the get-go. We're not doing that. We don't touch AI. It's not proven. It hallucinates. You had all the reasons. So I invited them to our meetings. I invited them in to say, "Hey, here's what we're trying to do. Here's the documents that we have. This is going to reside within our firewall. We're not going to do anything. This is phase one of many phases coming up, but let's allow me to start with this." And by them being in the room, that was a game changer because they were able to ask a heck of a lot of questions from Power Connect AI. They were able to ask a lot of questions from us, what we were trying to do and how do we accomplish that? That really launched everything.
Brad Langley: So I'd love to get into some specifics. Can you walk me through the AI call center app that you designed? What were the goals and the workflow that you ended up creating for this?
Georges Gonzalez: So this is for just agent assist, which is really assisting the agents that are getting the calls. Before we implemented this, it depended on who you called and it depends who had the information. So you literally have to put the customer on hold and then you go and you find the information. My team literally had bells on their desk. They would ring the bell and then a supervisor would come out and kind of help them through. So by putting this in place, now they had, instead of a bell, they had that information at their fingertips. I hired a trainer and what they did was they gathered all the information and put it in a package. So they worked for months on making sure that all the training was correct, all the steps were correct, all the data, all the links to the rules and the policies and the laws, the statutes and everything else was all correct.
We were able to find dozens and dozens of errors, even in our own documents, even in our own system, even in our own website that we have been able to correct. So that has been a huge positive for us. Once that was done that was given to Power Connect AI, they uploaded it into the software and that is what the team uses. Now the beauty of it is it gives the staff that's using it, it gives it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If it gives it a thumbs down, it asks them, "Please provide some additional information." So right at that moment they can update the system and there's a trainer, a second eyes that approves it and then they clean it and then they approve it and then it's uploaded into the software. What that has allowed us to do is really be very proactive when the information is wrong and update it at a moment's notice.
And that has really allowed us to move the training from 17 or so weeks down to four weeks. I mean, that's significant ROI when you talk about having four or five member team being trained and you're putting them on the phone two months ahead of schedule of what you normally would do. So that was a game changer.
Brad Langley: What is the call center rep seeing through this AI agent that they weren't able to see before?
Georges Gonzalez: Everything that the customer calls about from billing how to, they can send either text or they can send emails with links with PDFs to the customer. We weren't able to do that before. So let's say you're calling in and you're like, "Hey, how do I pay my bill on your system?" You as an agent can walk the customer through step by step or you can say, "May I send you the link with the PDF, with the paper, with a document that has the steps so that way you have it?" So they have multiple options on how to do this, but that has really changed the way we approach calls, especially if you're a new person and you're like, "Oh, what was that that I talked three weeks ago?" Now you have it at your fingertips. It also allows all of us to see is a customer mad at you because it has sentiments.
So the customer is trending green and then it got orange and then it got red. We can go back and listen to the call and hear exactly where and when that customer changed the tone. Was it because you said no? So we're using it as a real life training opportunity.
Brad Langley: And why was AI the choice for this? Why did you need AI to essentially do this coalescing of information and then providing information to the CSRs as they're on calls? Why was it the best solution for addressing this problem?
Georges Gonzalez: Well, it's a tool and people forget that. That AI, all it is, is a tool to assist you to better enhance the role that you're doing because you hear a lot about, "Oh, it gives you answers." Oh yeah, it gives you the answers that you already built into the system. So we use AI because first it's a new tool that we have available in the market. I hear people say, "I don't use AI." Do you use Maps? Do you use Facebook? Do you use LinkedIn? Do you use Google? So I go down the list. I hear this from sometimes really high level folks and I wanted to see what it could do. For us as a team, can we improve? Can we have ROI on whatever process we're trying to improve? So we brought in several companies before we selected Power Connect AI. So we brought in and we had a lot of demos and the frontline team selected Power Connect AI because it was intuitive.
It was easy to maneuver. You had control, not Power Connect, not the company. So you had a super user in your house that could do updates as we go along, that could take people out, could add people in. So that was really important for us because we change things constantly. So we wanted to make sure that we had a system that was easy to use, easy to navigate, easy to understand and can provide information to my agent to better help the customer.
Brad Langley: So along those lines, security and IT were a bit reticent at first because it's AI. There's obviously a lot of concerns out there about AI replacing people's jobs. So how did the CSRs themselves respond to the introduction of AI? Did they immediately see the value? Did it take some time? How did you approach that with the employees and what was their reaction?
Georges Gonzalez: So initially it was like, "Oh man, you're trying to get rid of me." Because they see you, at least they see me as a private sector guy with a private [sector] mentality, you're going to get rid of people because you hear in the news often. What I told them was, "No, we're not replacing you. We are giving you a tool to better enhance your role." And that was driven every single day. They were part of the process. They were part of the testing. They were part of providing solutions that they still are, by the way. So they understand we're not getting rid of anybody. And we are able because of the extra knowledge and skillset that they bring, I have been successful at getting them a little bit more money. So that is always a motivator for most people. So they have been able to see the positive side of it.
So it's not like we're going to get rid of people. It's, "Oh wow, okay, he's giving us more skills. He's also giving us more salary." And the salary part is low because you're looking at the bigger picture now, so the whole entire county. But that's been my mantra since I got here with HR. We need to pay for the right skillset, but it wasn't easy. It wasn't an easy sell at the beginning, but I tell them often, listen, if you're an early adopter of things, whatever that thing may be, think of the computer when we went from a typewriter to the computer, think of things like that. So your skillset, we may need less people, but we're not going to get rid of anyone. We're going to shift your skillset to something else and if you want to learn even more, we're going to give you the opportunity to do that.
So I think that's really changed. And again, following through on your words, not just saying it and then something different. Following through on your words is really, really important.
Brad Langley: So what does the future of this pilot look like? You guys have anything planned for future phases?
Georges Gonzalez: So future phases are coming up in June. So we have Agent 360 coming on. This is something we are testing with IT and cybersecurity as we speak. The telephony that the county had really didn't match the new technology that we were bringing in with AI. So we had to put some new software in place. We purchased that. The water resources purchased that and they're testing it right now. Again, it's another tool to assist the customers to better serve them. So when the customers call in, it's two or three questions that they may ask and if they don't get the answer, then it goes directly to a live agent. When that happens, the live agent through the tool that they already use has all the information that the customer already asked AI. So they'll have the transcripts ready to go so you don't have to tell your story all over again.
It'll also recognize you as a customer calling in. So that's the next phase. And then later on in the month we are going to be piloting the Dispatcher 360, which is really the new thing for water. So we use lift stations here. So lift stations, because we're flat, we use lift stations to move the wastewater around the county into the plants to the wastewater plants. So we get a lot of alarms going to the county on that. So we have a number of people that are actually sitting there in addition to their job putting in codes when they get it. And I have a night shift team that does just that, putting in codes to shut off the alarm and then they play telephone games with a bunch of people. So what we've done is we met with the team, with the technical team and the technicians out in the field and we developed this new process of automatic dispatching.
So the lift station calls in, AI responds, put in the code, especially when it comes to storm, especially when it comes to rainy season here, we get a lot of alarms at the same time. So basically AI can respond to multiple hundreds of calls at the same time. It'll put in the code and then it'll message depending on the area of the county that is in, it'll message the supervisor on duty and then the supervisor on duty can dispatch that call automatically to a technician. So it cuts the time of the phone tag or whatever because it's all done automated through their phones. So we're testing that and that really has caused some, to be honest, some heartburn with the team because what are you going to do with my team at night? But what's happened is over the last six months or so, we've lost about 60% of the team at night and it's really hard to replace folks working at night.
So the ones that are staying, they understand that we still need some eyeballs on this process. We still need some activity happening. At least you need to observe the system, but we're having difficulty hiring new folks. So this is going to help with minimizing that inability. So we're pretty excited about that one.
Brad Langley: That's great. And is there a big decision point after the pilot? I mean, is it simply a go-no-go on integrating these AI tools? Are you guys looking to achieve certain metrics like improve customer sat, lower call volume, shorter calls? What is kind of fueling that decision of, yes, we are going all in with this type of solution?
Georges Gonzalez: So we're going to have data. So we're going to have the ability for after hours for us to be able to provide data when it comes to overtime, when it comes to new people, when it comes to new technicians, our county's growing and we have a manual process of doing all of that right now. So we have Excel files going all over the place. Having this online, it allows you to very quickly get some analytics behind what is happening with the system itself. So we can say we had a hundred calls from South County on lift stations one, two, three and two, four, five. Let's just say, okay, what's going on with those two lift stations? So we can go and invest some money so we can minimize the calls that are calling in. We'll be able to advise the customers a little bit faster than we are today.
Once we do go or no go, that's what we have planned for it. So I think if anything else, that piece of Dispatcher 360 is going to be the biggest impact for us because people in our department, calls that are coming in, they'll have the ability in their hands to say, "No, I need to go take care of that," to make sure that the customers and the staff are getting the tools that they need to better assist them with the work. And I think that's going to be a huge impact for us.
Brad Langley: We call this show With Great Power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a famous Spider-Man quote, "With great power comes great responsibility." So Georges, what superpower do you bring to the energy and water transition that's currently underway?
Georges Gonzalez: Oh boy, I don't consider myself to have any superpower or anybody else. I just look at things a little different. I view things from my mother's eyes. My mother came to this country as a 40-year-old lady who didn't speak English, still doesn't, very little. So everything that I try to do to help the customer, I'm approaching it from her eyes. So everything I try to do here, I share it with her. So I translate everything and I share it with her. If it makes sense to an 85-year-old lady that doesn't speak English, I'm good and that's my approach and it has worked. I probably bring a different perspective because I sit in the finance side, I sit on the operational side to be able to not just go to water or wastewater events, but really connect with people such as yourself and in other sectors of this industry because you got water, gas, you have wastewater, you have electric, going to sessions and hearing what's happening in your world.
And then I think, okay, how do I convert that to my world? And I think that my superpower is just being able to connect a whole lot of dots that some people may not necessarily have the bandwidth or they're wanting to do it. So that's what I bring.
Brad Langley: That's a terrific answer, Georges. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Georges Gonzalez: Pleasure.
Brad Langley: Georges Gonzalez is Enterprise Solutions Director for Hillsborough County, Florida. With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on our clean energy future is complex.
GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid. Mary Catherine O'Connor is our producer. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show.
The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you and we really hope it is, we'd love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate or review us on Apple and Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life.
As always, thanks so much for listening. I'm Brad Langley.