#intelligent-infrastructure

#intelligent-infrastructure

The CIOs I most want to work with are the ones who haven't abandoned either role. They're genuinely curious about how the infrastructure works, not just what it delivers.

Data centers accounted for around 50% of all electricity demand growth in the U.S. last year, according to the IEA, far surpassing the rise in electricity usage in the residential, industrial, and transport sectors.

The delivery follows an initial batch of 10 buses introduced in August 2025, bringing the total number of vehicles supplied under the programme to 100. The buses have been integrated into the NTC fleet, which has historically operated an ageing vehicle base.

Intercity bus transport in Europe is characterized by a fragmented operator landscape, including a high number of small and medium-sized companies, alongside less standardized operational patterns and frequent dual-use vehicle profiles.

In the past, roof inspections mostly focused on what could be seen from the outside. Contractors looked for broken shingles, worn flashing, or areas where water might enter the roof. The problem is that roof damage does not always show clear signs right away. Water can move through roofing layers before it becomes visible inside the home.

Despite significant investments and technological advancements, the reality is that no vehicle currently operating on public roads can be classified as fully autonomous. The complexities of real-world driving conditions present insurmountable challenges.

For more than a decade, autonomous buses have been "almost ready." Demonstrations with safety drivers began around 2015, and ten years later, this is still largely what we see. The reason is not a lack of ambition - it is physics, safety, and economics. Autonomous buses on city streets are inherently difficult. They carry dozens of passengers, operate as heavy vehicles, and move through a chaotic urban environment.

Baron traces the origin story back to his time building high-scale systems at Instana (which exited to IBM in 2020), where the reality of "always-on" platforms made one thing obvious: the tooling we rely on is often too low-level, too rigid, and too disconnected from real-world use cases. That gap has only widened as environments have exploded in complexity-more cloud providers, more managed services, more hybrid setups, more internal APIs, and "gillions" of tools stitched together into brittle workflows.

Earlier we did episode one of this with Grady Booch where we discussed the principled view of that what's changing and what remains unchanged, what is hyped and what is actually naturally coming with the AI changes. We also spoke about that what is the difference between the design and the architecture and what teams are focusing and what they might be missing.

It's tempting to frame autonomous driving as a single leap. In public transport, adoption tends to be incremental - because the system is built for reliability, and new capabilities have to fit into daily operations without disrupting service. That is why a practical strategy is evolution, not revolution: introduce autonomy in a defined domain, learn safely in real operations, and expand capability step-by-step.

Between the lines: This isn't benevolence. It's customer acquisition. Mayors don't just buy "AI." They buy cloud, data modernization, cybersecurity, services, and long-term support - the tech stack underneath any serious deployment. In return, cities get tools that could fix long-standing challenges, Cris Turner, vice president of government affairs at Google told Axios last June when it first released its playbook.