Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Power Systems: Strategies to Identify and Close Capability Gaps

Abstract

The rapid expansion of AI-driven information infrastructure, particularly data centers, is placing unprecedented pressure on power systems and accelerating the pace at which new assets must interconnect with the grid. As bulk transmission expansion rolls out slowly, new loads and generation are increasingly deployed within existing network constraints. Agentic AI is urgently needed to automate the numerous and repetitive connection processes, but its maturity has not been systematically validated on complex tasks and large-scale systems. We replicate the current state of the art in agentic AI for power systems planning and evaluate it against a structured suite of nodal planning problems spanning six levels of task complexity and four grid scales. We find that only the two lowest complexity levels are solvable on some of the test grid sizes, and identify the specific capability upgrades required to close this gap. Adopting stricter testing protocols and reproducible evaluation benchmarks is essential for assessing both genuine progress and the operational readiness of agentic AI.