Matthew Alberts

Matthew Alberts

Manager, Innovation and Emerging Technologies Southern Company

A dynamic Technology Strategist with a profound track record in spearheading digital transformation across various sectors. Matthew’s forte lies in blending AI/ML expertise with strategic planning to drive impactful business results. With a rich history of leading high-profile projects, he has demonstrated his prowess in project management, mechanical integrity engineering, and fostering innovation. As a proactive leader, he prioritizes cross-functional collaboration, ensuring alignment with industry standards and overarching business goals. His academic journey, crowned with a PhD in Industrial Engineering focusing on AI/ML, complements his hands-on experience, making him adept at translating technical insights into strategic actions.

Pre-Conference Workshop & Masterclass - February 23, 2026

3:15 PM Capturing Institutional Knowledge with AI Workflows, Agentic AI and Causal AI

Institutional knowledge is one of the energy industry’s most valuable assets, yet it is at constant risk of being lost through retirements, turnover, and organizational change. This masterclass explores how AI can preserve, scale, and activate that knowledge across the workforce. We will look at how captured knowledge, when paired with data, can streamline repeatable processes through AI Workflows, and how Causal Agentic AI moves beyond automation by combining expert logic and data to reason, predict, make decisions, and explain itself in context.

Once captured, this knowledge becomes a living resource that strengthens the workforce. It accelerates onboarding and training, guides frontline decision-making with expert reasoning, supports reskilling and upskilling, and ensures continuity when experienced staff move on. Participants will see how these approaches combine to build resilient knowledge systems that support safety, reliability, cost efficiency, and faster decision-making while helping energy companies retain critical expertise and prepare their workforce for the future. 

Main Conference Day 1 - February 24, 2026

3:10 PM Panel Discussion: The Ethics Equation: Governing AI in a High-Stakes Energy Landscape

As AI becomes deeply embedded the need for ethical oversight has never been more urgent. While 77% of organizations are actively developing AI governance strategies (rising to 90% among those with operational AI), the industry still grapples with a fundamental question: how do we govern AI responsibly in environments here the stakes are high, and the consequences of failure even higher? This session will explore:

    • How organizations can move from capability to responsibility when automating tasks with AI, balancing efficiency with ethical considerations, especially in contexts where human judgment remains essential
    • How to implement governance frameworks that provide guardrails, not guesswork, evaluating AI outputs for accuracy, mitigating hallucinations, and reducing bias to build trust in systems making increasingly high-impact decisions
    • How to identify and address bias and behavior in AI models by uncovering hidden biases, understanding model behavior patterns, and training teams to critically assess AI-generated outputs  

    Check out the incredible speaker line-up to see who will be joining Matthew.

    Download The Latest Agenda