LAS VEGAS, June 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Pano AI, the leader in AI-powered wildfire detection, today announced a major expansion of its capabilities for electric utilities and emergency managers at EEI 2026, the electric power industry’s premier annual convention. The new capabilities help stakeholders spot fires sooner and gauge how each one is likely to spread. They also help utilities coordinate with emergency management officials and get critical information to crews on the ground faster. The expansion arrives as utilities brace for a summer that federal forecasters expect to bring above-normal fire activity across much of the country.
The expansion builds on a year of measurable results. In 2025, Pano alerted on 735 vegetation fires and was the first known alert more than half of the time, drawing on a platform that now monitors more than 50 million acres, a training database of over 4 billion images, and a portfolio of six patents spanning panoramic imaging, geolocation, and map-based visualization.
According to the National Interagency Fire Center’s latest outlook, significant wildland fire potential is forecast to be above normal across large portions of the West this summer, with persistent drought and developing El Niño shaping conditions. For electric utilities — which carry growing responsibility to reduce ignition risk and maintain reliable service — earlier detection and shared situational awareness can give crews the time they need to keep a new ignition small, regardless of its cause. Those utilities partner with emergency management teams around the country to coordinate when fires are detected.
Pano’s 2026 summer utility release focuses on three areas:
- Earlier detection, intelligent signals. Pano’s new daytime and nighttime AI detection models sharpen how quickly and reliably smoke is identified across varied terrain and changing light. A new Technosylva integration adds predictive fire-behavior modeling on top of live detection, so a utility sees both where a fire is and where it’s likely to move. Time to Arrival, now in early access, estimates when a fire could reach critical assets. New lightning and “zoom to lightning” workflows (early access), together with a new Western Weather Group integration, bring weather and ignition-risk context directly into the platform, and new private map layers let utilities overlay their own infrastructure data.
- Smarter situational awareness for complex operations. A new Operations Center View gives utility and emergency operations teams a shared, real-time picture of unfolding conditions across large and complex territories. Integrated NOAA weather data, a new thermal hotspot layer, and new FAA flight tracking that covers helicopters and aircraft give teams more to work with as conditions change.
- Targeted alerts, tighter coordination. New location-rich incident notifications, a chronological incident timeline with collaborative comments, and new county-based alert areas with geofenced notifications ensure the right teams are informed quickly and precisely. New prescribed-burn context reduces unnecessary alerts, and new network-sharing capabilities let neighboring agencies and utilities gain visibility across boundaries.
“Utilities are working hand in hand with emergency managers to mitigate wildfire risk, and the teams protecting our grid deserve the best tools we can build,” said Sonia Kastner, co-founder and CEO of Pano AI. “From day one, we’ve worked to help utilities work with emergency managers by giving them an unparalleled system of action – it means not only early detection, but the context to understand the assets nearby, anticipate the fire’s spread, and a platform that helps get the right resources moving quickly.”
Pano is showcasing these capabilities at EEI 2026 in Las Vegas this week, meeting with utility leaders working to reduce wildfire risk and strengthen grid resilience across their service territories. The new capabilities are subject to commercial partnerships and commercial engagement.
About Pano AI
Pano AI is the leader in AI-powered wildfire detection. Launched in 2020, the company provides advanced early detection and situational awareness solutions to fire agencies, utilities, governments, and private landholders to help protect people, property, and infrastructure from catastrophic wildfires. With deployments across the U.S., Canada, and Australia, Pano AI is building a new standard for real-time wildfire intelligence. To learn more, visit http://www.pano.ai or follow the company on LinkedIn.
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