Each system operator that I know of (I'm not omniscient) has a planning department (1-30 years), as well as groups which handle near term planning (1 day to 6 months out).

It wouldn't be unheard of to work with outside consultants on special projects, but that would normally entail working with someone that has very specialized experience in power systems operations (ex: expert in voltage stability). I'm not sure if that is the case here, but maybe one of their employees will stop by and enlighten me. Again, wording is really tough in online forums. I am genuinely curious about the role they serve. Although AI is hardly new in power systems (lots of lisp and prolog applications were created in the early 90s), those were mainly expert systems as opposed to the machine learning of today. Like I said, there are definitely some applications, but usually nothing that some Python or R can't handle. I'm not sure if there are many products that would sell in this space. Maybe their employees have picked up enough domain knowledge coupled with good development skills to help with machine learning projects like you have guessed? It is certainly possible.