Artificial Intelligence in Energy Markets: The Case for AI-Ready Data & Human Expertise

Power markets are entering a new era of increased load and transmission demand. As infrastructure complexity grows and data volumes expand, market participants best positioned are those who combine advanced analytics with trusted data and market insights. Artificial intelligence can help you navigate the markets faster than before, especially when paired with datasets that are clean, accurate, and complete for immediate use.

At Yes Energy, we’ve built our reputation on one thing: trusted, control-room-quality data. Our approach is simple but critical: ensure every dataset is accurate, AI-ready, and overseen by market specialists. As AI reshapes how markets operate, our responsibility is to ensure that same trust carries forward into every dataset, every model, and every decision.

By combining rigorous data practices with deep market knowledge, we help organizations leverage AI with confidence by turning potential into actionable intelligence while maintaining transparency, trust, and governance over the data.

Let’s dive into what this means for you. 

Artificial Intelligence in Power Markets: Trust Before Speed

In energy markets, speed means nothing without accuracy. A fast model built on unreliable data creates more noise than insight. However, when your foundation is built on trustworthy data, teams can focus on insight – not cleanup – and optimize AI-driven power market tasks. This means providing datasets that are accurate, structured, and standardized, supported by data delivery platforms designed to handle modern AI workloads at scale. 

Power markets are among the world’s most complex and data-rich commodity markets, making them ideal for AI and algorithmic decision-making but only when datasets are ready. Studies show that nearly half of enterprise AI projects fail due to inadequate data preparation.

Our teams address this challenge with a “both-and” approach that combines human intelligence with AI-ready data infrastructure.

Every system we build starts with human expertise. Our market analysts and data engineers set the standard for data integrity, ensuring AI models are trained on accurate trustworthy information. We have teams dedicated to creating, monitoring, and fixing data pipelines, as well as cleaning, standardizing, and preparing the data at the row and storage-level, ensuring alignment with real market behaviors.

For example, we make sure that the data correctly aligns to each datetime timestamp, time zone, and, over daylight savings, long and short days. By delivering datasets structured for immediate use, we help organizations spend their energy on insight and confident decision-making instead of labor-intensive preparation.

What Makes Yes Energy Data Truly “AI-Ready”?

Our AI-ready datasets provide the foundation for all types of advanced analysis and machine learning applications. Key features include:

• Comprehensive Historical and Vintage Data: Our datasets preserve point-in-time records of market data, including price revisions over time. This vintaging allows models to train on authentic historical conditions, which is critical for backtesting and better forecasting.
• Analytics-Ready Structure: We deliver data in formats that’s immediately usable for modeling: the “wide” format, where each column is a feature; and the “long” format, where each row is a feature. You don’t need to perform complex cleansing or transformation before feeding it into AI pipelines.
• Calculated Data Types (Feature Engineering): We’ve built in derived values and meaningful metrics, saving quants and analysts development time while ensuring consistent and reliable inputs for models.
• Scale and Performance: DataSignals® Cloud is built on Snowflake’s elastic architecture, enabling massive-scale AI/ML workloads without data scraping limitations or replication issues. Our infrastructure supports both large-volume data access and integration with preferred AI/ML platforms.
• Strong Data Integration and Collaboration: We provide data delivery products for seamless integration and collaboration, helping teams overcome both technical and organizational barriers to AI adoption.
• Security and Compliance: Enterprise-grade infrastructure with strict access controls and encryption ensures data integrity and confidentiality, so that you can trust your AI workflows.

By combining these elements, we provide a foundation that is optimized for AI, enabling you to build, train, and deploy models faster, with fewer errors and less manual overhead.

AI as a Force Multiplier

Artificial intelligence amplifies human expertise – it does not replace it. The most effective teams are those who can learn the fastest from their data, applying judgment and experience alongside AI-driven insights.

For instance, Duke Energy blends machine-learning analytics with the judgment of its grid specialists: it uses AI to flag high-risk transformer circuits and then relies on experienced engineers to decide where capital-maintenance crews should be deployed, resulting in more consistent identification of problematic equipment and better planning decisions.

Market participants can apply the same human-in-the-loop principle to power markets, leveraging AI-ready, control-room-quality data to identify risks, spot opportunities, and act with greater confidence.

That’s why our approach emphasizes the human-in-the-loop philosophy. Every dataset and model we deliver reflects the experience of people who live and breathe power markets, empowering customers to make faster, smarter decisions without sacrificing accuracy or control.

Our AI-ready data serves as the foundation for a wide range of applications across energy markets. While we’ll explore these use cases in depth in future blogs, some of the most common applications include:

• Deterministic Trading and Forecasting: Leveraging historical and real-time data to refine and adapt trading strategies to inform and optimize automated trading strategies.
• Anomaly Detection and Risk Management: Identifying unusual grid conditions or market behaviors that could indicate operational or financial risk for bidding strategies.

• Natural Language Interaction: Allowing users to query complex market data conversationally to surface insights without coding. 

Ultimately, Yes Energy aims to blend human intelligence with artificial intelligence by providing high-quality data that accelerates insights without compromising accuracy or trust, enabling teams to focus on strategy rather than data collection and preparation. When our teams deliver the best market information and insights, we foster open, competitive, reliable, and low-cost power markets.

Choosing Your AI Foundation: DataSignals

The path to AI-driven decision-making begins with the proper foundation. Our DataSignals products provide the tools and infrastructure to turn AI-ready data into market decisions.

• DataSignals Cloud: Our cloud-native platform is built for large-scale AI/ML workloads and combines data storage and compute for high-frequency, high-volume applications. It’s ideal for serious model training, backtesting, and leveraging Snowflake’s native AI/ML capabilities.
• DataSignals Lake: This platform-agnostic option offers bulk historical data files for teams committed to collecting data into their own infrastructure.
• DataSignals API (DSAPI): Ideal for prototyping, smaller automation tasks, or integration with spreadsheets and reporting tools.
• Hybrid Advantage: DataSignals Cloud and Lake both include access to DataSignals API, giving teams flexibility to scale from prototyping to production within a single package.

Conclusion: Human and Artificial Intelligence for Energy Market Optimization

The convergence of AI and energy markets presents unprecedented opportunities to transform how decisions are made and value created, but only for those who build on a foundation of trusted, AI-ready data. 

Human expertise and artificial intelligence are complementary forces: AI can help accelerate insights, uncover patterns, and reduce repetitive work, while human intelligence ensures decisions are accurate, strategic, and aligned with market realities.

Our mission is to deliver datasets that are correct, structured, and enriched, providing the foundation for confident AI-driven workflows and decision-making. By combining this with our team of analysts and market specialists, we enable you to act faster, reduce operational risk, and unlock value from your data investments.

The future of AI in the energy sector isn’t just about technology. It’s about the intersection of trusted data and expert insight. By combining these elements, Yes Energy can help you explore the use of AI as it drives the next evolution of power markets.

Contact our team of experts to learn more.

About the author: Sonal Sakhardande is the vice president of engineering at Yes Energy, where she leads technology strategy focused on building modern, scalable platforms and using AI responsibly to help customers better understand and act on energy data. With nearly two decades of experience, including senior leadership roles at S&P Global, she has guided large engineering teams through cloud transformation and data-driven innovation that improve performance and reliability. Her work centers on transforming complex systems into integrated platforms that strengthen decision-making and deliver lasting value for Yes Energy’s customers. Outside of work, Sonal supports organizations that expand education for girls, reflecting her belief that investing in technology and in people creates lasting impact.

About the author: Maria Torres is a solutions engineer at Yes Energy, part translator, part trail guide, and full-time market explorer. She connects the dots between what traders dream up and the tools that make it happen, all while keeping pace with an ever-changing energy market. With 14+ years in FTR/CRR trading across PJM and ERCOT, Maria now channels that experience into helping build the next generation of power market tools. When she’s not deep in data, you’ll find her diving coral reefs in the Caribbean or helping rescue pups find their forever homes.