Senior AI copilot development talent and rates in Energy & Utilities
Senior AI copilot development engineers serving energy & utilities run roughly $150–$215/hr. Stack realities for this combination: Itron + Salesforce E&U Cloud + AWS IoT TwinMaker + private VPC — common integrations: Itron + Landis+Gyr AMI, Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud, OSI PI + GE PI System. Demand forecasting; load disaggregation; outage prediction
What AI copilot development actually requires in 2026
2026 copilot defaults: OpenAI/Anthropic for the LLM, custom retrieval for in-product context, function-calling to product actions, embedded UI in React (shadcn + AI SDK), feedback loops via LangSmith or PostHog. Cursor and GitHub Copilot are the gold-standard reference patterns. Copilot engineers must understand product context retrieval, action discovery (what can the copilot actually do?), and feedback loops (thumbs up/down → eval set growth). A junior implementation is "ChatGPT in a sidebar" — barely useful and quickly abandoned.