50% of America's water utility operators retire by 2030. They carry 30 years of institutional knowledge — which pipes fail in cold snaps, which pumps cavitate under load, which neighborhoods flood when it rains hard. That knowledge lives in their heads, not in any system.
At the same time, 70% of utilities are legally prohibited from using cloud AI due to federal cybersecurity mandates. So when the next generation of operators arrives, they inherit aging infrastructure, disconnected data systems, and no way to access what their predecessors knew.