Speaker: Carrie O'Hara (TC Energy)

Abstract: 

Operational resilience is being redefined: it’s no longer just recovery from outages, but the ability to anticipate disruption, operate safely through it, and adapt as conditions change. As AI expands what’s possible in operational intelligence and automation, it also reshapes the risk landscape—accelerating cyber threats, increasing system complexity, and raising new governance questions. This session explores how the traditional “air gap” is evolving into architectures that are intentionally connected yet engineered for resilience, with operational data treated as critical infrastructure that must be trusted, contextualized, and securely shared. We’ll also address the human dimension—how to use AI to augment operators and engineers without eroding hard-earned expertise, while keeping accountability firmly with people. Finally, we’ll look ahead to what resilient operations could look like by 2035, including AI-assisted decisioning, predictive/adaptive operations, and secure industrial data ecosystems.