Today’s water utilities are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The impacts of climate change, the needs of growing and increasingly urban populations, and the realities of the largest economic crisis seen in more than a century all demand that they do more with less. Utilities are being asked to provide more resilient, efficient, and sustainable water supply and sanitation (WSS) services to more people than ever before , all while operating in an economically constrained environment that has slowed investments in the water sector worldwide.

Meanwhile, a wide variety of technology solutions are available to help utilities solve these urgent challenges: from trenchless automated leak repair technologies that can find and fix buried pipe leaks without the need for invasive and expensive excavation works, to artificial intelligence that can predict the risk of failures and leaks in water distribution networks, to an autonomous microbiology analyzer for in situ water quality monitoring. So why is it that these solutions are not deployed more widely?