As utilities navigate rising affordability pressures that are more in the spotlight than ever, along with ever-increasing system complexity and heightened expectations from both customers and employees alike, innovation is no longer a “nice to have.”
Innovation, in today’s landscape, is a core operational imperative.
Nowhere is that more clear than at Exelon, one of the nation’s largest utility families. To get some insight into how that innovation is being treated as a core tenet rather than a passing buzzword, I had the chance to sit down with Anirudh Paduru (AP), Exelon’s Director of Customer Strategy, Planning, and Governance. From his unique vantage point, AP shares how he and Exelon his team are approaching innovation deliberately by connecting customer experience, grid reliability, and long-term affordability through a unified strategy. And their approach is clearly creating results, as Public Utilities Fortnightly recently recognized Exelon with more Innovation Awards than any other utility.
A key part of that story is Exelon’s recent and ongoing collaboration with N-Smart, whose Bluetooth-based asset tracking technology emerged as a powerful solution to a persistent field operations challenge. What began as a tool calibration issue quickly evolved into a broader rethink of asset visibility, process efficiency, and employee experience.
Read on to learn from AP how Exelon identified the problem, evaluated the technology through a structured pilot, and ultimately scaled the solution across hundreds of vehicles.
Matt Chester: Tell me about your role at Exelon and the top priorities you're working on these days.
AP: I’m the Director of Customer Strategy, Planning, and Governance in the Corporate Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability department at Exelon Corporation. For those who may not be familiar, Exelon is one of the nation’s largest utility companies, serving more than 10.7 million customers through six fully regulated utilities (operating companies) across different states in the United States. I work on the corporate side of the business.
In my role, I lead enterprise-wide customer strategy and planning, with a strong focus on distributed energy resources (DERs) and future-ready solutions. My work spans enabling customer adoption of DERs—making the process simple, shaping supportive policies, and ensuring these resources strengthen grid reliability and resiliency. Beyond DERs, I drive enterprise initiatives on Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), Data Centers and large-load integration, and long-term customer strategy. This includes partnering closely with Exelon’s operating companies to embed operational and regulatory priorities into solutions that meet evolving customer needs.
At a broader level, our corporate customer strategy team is focused on reducing customer effort and making things easier for customers across all personas and segments. Affordability is also a major priority and top of mind, especially over the past couple of years with rising energy prices across the united states
All of these priorities are connected by an invisible thread. When we talk about customers, we inevitably talk about technology. To deploy technology, the system needs to be ready, and it requires investment, bringing us back to affordability. We try to look at all of this holistically and ask: what can we do today that will create a positive impact to the customer? What should we be doing over the next five years? And what about the next ten?
MC: You mention the invisible thread connecting these priorities, and I imagine another one is the focus on innovation as a way to solve them. Why is innovation more than just a buzzword for you all and how do you approach these challenges with that spirit of innovation?
AP: I’m really proud of the innovative mindset across Exelon and the work we’ve accomplished together over the years. We have a very robust innovation process. It’s a disciplined, deliberate process that’s been refined for more than a decade. It’s tied directly to our company’s KPIs and long-term goals, supported by clear metrics and a quarterly review process that reaches the CEOs of our operating companies and Exelon CEO, Calvin Butler.
Our operating companies play a central role in this journey, bringing forward ideas and implementing solutions that make a real impact for customers and communities. We ask ourselves how we innovate in the areas that matter most and how we empower employees to solve real, emerging problems. To make that possible, we encourage open innovation through a variety of channels and leverage Reinvent, a platform we co-developed to transform how we innovate—launching strategic campaigns, sourcing ideas from employees across all OpCos, and sharing knowledge enterprise-wide.
As our CEO, Calvin Butler, has said recently, “we cultivate a culture of innovation and continuous improvement that influences not just the tools we use, but the way we work”. For us, innovation isn’t limited to technology. It includes process improvements, employee-driven ideas, and customer-focused solutions—all working together to shape the future of energy.[AP1]
MC: To take that conversation about innovation into a tangible use case, talk to me about how you got involved with the N-Smart team? What were the problems you had identified that needed solving and why did N-Smart seem like the right partner for working through that?
AP: When I was leading the BGE innovation team between 2019 and 2021, one of our directors from the electric distribution field team reached out and said, “We’re having an issue, and we need an innovative solution.”
In Electric Distribution and Operations, field employees rely on specialized tools that must be calibrated regularly. If they aren’t calibrated correctly, they may not perform as intended, which can lead to unintended consequences—including safety issues. While a process existed, the underlying technology wasn’t effective. The team was using barcodes to track calibration schedules, but stickers were peeling, scans were unreliable, and the system simply wasn’t working.
They had already explored options with BGE vendors and tried existing technologies, but nothing solved the problem. That’s when the innovation team was called into support. I remembered meeting the N-Smart team earlier at an industry conference, so I reached out to see if they had ideas. Almost immediately, they said, “We have something that could work.”
We invited N-Smart to one of our service centers to present their solution. What N-Smart presented genuinely surprised us. Instead of barcodes, QR codes, or even RFID, they proposed a Bluetooth-based solution.
I still remember this moment clearly. It almost sounded too good to be true, so one of our directors said, “Let’s test it right now.” He took one of the tags, climbed into a bucket truck, and hid it in a tightly enclosed space—exactly the kind of environment where other technologies had failed in the past. Within seconds, N-Smart was able to identify the tag.
That was the moment we knew we had found something different.
MC: N-Smart and Exelon partnered on a pilot to start testing out the technology. Walk us through that pilot process.
AP: We initially approached this from a single dimension: tracking tool calibration. Once we saw the technology in action, we took a step back and asked, “Is this really the full problem—or is there more we can solve here?” With N-Smart acting as a partner, they helped us explore the broader possibilities and how others have used their solution.
The field crews were excited, so the innovation team went back to the drawing board. We conducted journey mapping for our internal customers—the field teams—to understand their day-to-day process, identify pain points, and see where this technology could make the most impact. We launched a three-month pilot, extended it for another three to four months, and evaluated it against criteria we had defined upfront.
The results were very clear. The pilot was successful, and we moved into a full-scale deployment. That project wrapped up just a few weeks ago, and we’ve now deployed the solution across roughly 320 vehicles throughout the system.
MC: You said the results were clear. What exactly were the immediate signals that this was a success and that your team wanted to go deeper?
AP: When we define success metrics for a pilot, there are multiple stakeholders involved, and each of them looks at the solution a little differently. From the innovation team’s perspective, we’re asking questions like: Can this solution scale? Can the company realistically deploy it across the system? How quickly can we adopt the technology? How complex is it to use, and what does the change management look like?
For the internal teams and end users in the field, the criteria are different. They care about usability. They want to know how this will help them beyond just calibration. Does it add more steps, or can it be as simple as one click to get the information they need? They also look closely at the form factor—will the tag actually stay on the tool, or will it fall off? How easy is it to attach the tag to different types of equipment?
So we went into the pilot with clearly defined, but different, success criteria across groups. By the end of the pilot, the N-Smart technology met those criteria across the board, which made it clear to us that this was a solution worth moving forward with.
Throughout the pilot, we were validating how smoothly the software worked, how easy it was to access, and latency when scanning tools and checking calibration status. The fact that the technology continued to perform well—even as we surfaced and addressed these real-world challenges—was one of the strongest signals that this was a solution worth scaling.
This outcome reflects Exelon’s deliberate innovation process: setting clear metrics upfront, engaging stakeholders early, and ensuring solutions align with both operational needs and long-term goals.
MC: As we’re moving into this new year with affordability and reliability seeming to dominate the headlines and the conversations with utility executives, how did this innovation seem to fit into that?
AP: In general, I’d say this applies to our overall approach to innovation, whether it’s through N-Smart or other initiatives. Innovation helps us deliver reliable energy while keeping costs down for customers. Affordability is a huge focus for us right now. As Colette Honorable, Exelon’s Chief Legal Officer, Compliance and Corporate Secretary said, “Rising energy costs are top of mind for the teams at Exelon who are working to meet growing demand while also addressing energy costs for families and small businesses”.
We are hosting the Exelon Innovation Expo in 2026, and the central theme of the expo is affordability. And what’s exciting is that we’re not just innovating for customers - we’re innovating with them and with the communities we serve. The N-Smart project is a great example of that mindset. Beyond this specific use case, N-Smart has deployed other technologies across Exelon that support material management, asset management, and operational efficiency. All of those improvements ultimately translate into cost savings, and those benefits flow back to customers in one way or another.
With the rise of AI, increasing system demands, and rapid technological change, we’re constantly looking to startups, established companies, and the communities we serve and asking: what can we do differently? How do we get where we need to go while keeping affordability and reliability front and center for our customers? One way is through programs like 2c2i (Climate Change Investment Initiative), which we launched in 2019. It’s a unique approach that combines venture capital with philanthropic goals by investing in early-stage startups focused on clean energy, resiliency, and social equity in our service areas. We provide funding and utility expertise to help these companies scale their technologies, which benefits both the industry and the communities we serve.
MC: For utility peers reading who may be considering similar pilots, what are your words of advice for how to start or how to get over the hurdle of just thinking about it into taking action?
AP: The biggest thing I’ve learned is that successful pilots start with clarity, not technology. It’s about understanding the problem and the customer experience first. Once you have that foundation, everything else falls into place. Getting from idea to action can feel daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. The key is breaking it down: start with the problem, then the process, then the people. Technology comes last, and when you get those first three right, the tech becomes an enabler rather than a fix.
From there, what really helps is the collaborative nature of our industry. Utilities, technology partners, and organizations like EPRI are deeply focused on innovation, and we’ve benefited so much from that ecosystem. Within Exelon, our operating companies play a huge role in shaping and executing these pilots. Their insights make sure solutions aren’t just theoretical—they’re practical, scalable, and aligned with customer needs.
For those considering similar efforts, my advice is simple: start by understanding the problem and the customer experience behind it. Often what you first see is just a symptom of something deeper. Once you have clarity on the problem, the process, and the people involved, technology becomes an enabler rather than a fix. And don’t overlook what you already have—sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from process innovation rather than new platforms.
MC: On that idea of internal innovation, can you share an example where Exelon drove innovation internally by rethinking processes and leveraging existing technologies?
A good example of that is our drone program that began back in 2019. We weren’t building drones ourselves, and we weren’t building the core software either. Instead, we looked at what was already available in the market and asked a simple question: how can we use this technology to fundamentally change how we do our work today?
At the time, we didn’t necessarily have a single, urgent problem we were trying to fix. The mission was broader. Could we make things easier and safer for our employees? And if we could do that, could we also reduce the cost and downtime associated with inspections—which ultimately ties back to affordability for customers?
From there, we built the drone program completely in-house from a process standpoint. We redesigned the entire workflow, developed our own standard operating procedures, and even created a flight school to train employees. We leveraged the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help build the training facility. From a technology perspective, we intentionally kept the platform drone-agnostic, so any drone could be used as long as it met our requirements.
What that led to was a full process innovation that drove significant operational efficiencies—both in terms of time and cost. Within a few years, the program was generating savings of more than $1 million and these savings keep growing. Today, we can scan assets faster, identify issues more quickly and deeply, and reduce inspection time and cost across the system.