On Saturday, our Chief Strategy Officer, Georgios Chatzargyros joined a panel on AI in Business, organised by the Italian-Greek Chamber of Commerce at the Hyatt Hotel Thessaloniki. The panel included representatives from mining, financial services, and industrial automation and the journalist D. Diamantidis as the coordinator.

Two examples from Renel’s own work came up in the discussion.

The first was ALTITUDE Project, a research programme developing an automated inspection system for medium and high-voltage power networks. The system uses drones, 5G data transmission, and convolutional neural networks to process optical and thermal imagery from automated flights, detect faults, assess risk, and generate actionable recommendations for grid operators such as HEDNO S.A. It is designed to replace manual inspection at scale, with consistent data quality across different geographies.

The second was closer to daily operations: the project management platforms used internally at Renel, where AI features are already part of how the team plans, tracks, and delivers engineering projects.

One point Mr. Chatzargyros raised that is worth keeping: before any AI system can perform, the data needs to exist. Companies that are not systematically recording operational data today are building a gap that will cost them later. The quality of AI output is directly proportional to the quality and continuity of the data fed into it.