This blog is the second  in a series of three. Read the first part here.

By Mitch Donnelly, FIDO Tech CEO

Fairly or unfairly, the water sector gets a rough ride when it comes to a reputation for running with new ideas. It’s regularly highlighted for slowness to adopt advanced technologies. The industry has only given rise to two tech unicorns (a startup valued at over $1bn), compared to more than 380 in the finance sector.

I recently wrote how differences in structure and governance create challenges and opportunities when it comes to tackling water leakage in the UK and US.

So, for this blog , I’m looking at how these market differences play out when utilities decide on which of the myriad new technologies currently flooding the market they’re going to run with.

 

The cost of non-revenue water: Why utilities need digital leak detection

Every two minutes, a water main somewhere in the US breaks. In fact, around 20% of treated US and UK drinking water goes missing before it reaches the consumer. It’s a billion-dollar headache for utilities whether it’s the risk of fines and reputational damage in the UK, or just huge uncaptured revenues which might otherwise be reinvested in infrastructure renewal.

On paper, it could all be so different. Technology like AI offers water utilities tantalizing new ways of mobilizing data to improve action and decision-making on all aspects of non-revenue water (NRW).

But juggling the pressure to deliver increasing amounts of affordable, high quality, reliable water while responding to the visible effects of climate on traditional water sources leaves utilities with scant resource for integrating new products and processes.

So, let’s get into it.

 

UK vs US: How market structures shape water tech adoption

First, a quick refresh on the UK and US scenes. The UK water market is made up of a small number of large heavily regulated regional monopolies. Companies must hit their leakage targets or face large financial penalties. This has seriously focused attention on finding and fixing leaks, and the UK has a history of innovation in proactive leak detection including district metering and pressure management.

The US market, on the other hand, is highly decentralized. There are tens of thousands of community water systems, mostly quite small. Where regulations do exist, standards and enforcement vary, as do funding models and performance metrics. On the positive side, buying decisions can be quicker but many utilities have not historically had the resource to invest in long term engineering like district metering. More often than not, leak response is a reaction to surfacing water or a customer complaint. When there are just five people running an entire water system, launching an advanced leak program is a stretch.

 

Top challenges water utilities face in adopting digital leak solutions

Between innovation in the UK and agile procurement in the US, each region has its own unique superpower to deploy in the field of tech adoption, right?

Well, not exactly. The rapid development of technologies like AI and the urgency to tackle non-revenue water has created a very crowded marketplace of solutions. From acoustic sensors to AI-driven analytics, hundreds of vendors promise to solve leakage and efficiency challenges with products that claim to be “smart,” “predictive,” “real-time”.

Even large water utilities can sometimes lack the technical bandwidth to validate these technology claims, and all of them have a tendency towards being risk averse. On top of that, modern NRW solutions often rely on advanced data analytics. If you don’t have telemetry and your historic data is untrustworthy or siloed, integration will have wider cost implications or could severely limit your ROI. Choosing the wrong technology can mean wasted investment and operational disruption.

In the US, where tight budgets and competing priorities reign, many utilities can’t afford to experiment widely, so they default to familiar or legacy solutions – even if better options exist. I spoke with one water system manager who talked about being overwhelmed with choices and feeling like he needed a degree in AI development to understand some of them, which along with limited unbiased guidance on which will work for their specific situation was causing decision paralysis. Once they do pick something, smaller utilities might not have the in-house expertise to get the most out of it, leading to underutilized tech on the shelf and even more reluctance to experiment in the future.

In the better resourced but highly regulated UK where the innovation culture is thriving there is often a ready budget for technology trials, but lengthy and compliance-heavy procurement slows down adoption into business as usual. The supplier organisation British Water recently reported that members found it challenging to engage with water companies on innovation, indicating that even though fast, cost-effective tech is available (and increasingly necessary to outpace issues like climate and aging pipes), the utility procurement frameworks often lag behind.

 

Strategies to overcome barriers and accelerate leak tech adoption

But it’s not all bad news. There’s mounting evidence that the UK market is starting to meet its suppliers halfway on procurement, and there are still routes to rapid adoption in both countries if tech proves itself. For instance, Thames Water used FIDO AI to analyze sounds from acoustic sensors to tell field crews where the real leaks are, filter out false positives from background noise, and even quantify how much water is being lost so they know which leaks are most urgent. Doing this helped them reduce their leak follow-up investigation rate by as much as 20%, meaning they could respond and fix leaks more efficiently. They are now using it routinely.

I also met a utility manager from a midwestern US city with a similar adoption success story. Following a successful pilot of a new leak detection sensor (you’ll forgive me for neglecting to name which one), they managed to budget for a full deployment across their system the very next year, essentially short-circuiting what still might have taken far longer under a UK-style regime.

Results like these – 20% better efficiency, less wasted effort and water – are hard for utilities to ignore, but even the best resourced utilities don’t have unlimited budget or native IT expertise to test every new solution. Pilots are expensive, the procurement hoops are numerous, and high-profile failure can risk regulatory or consumer backlash.

The sheer number of solutions vying for attention means education is key. Vendors like FIDO need to do more to help utilities understand, prove and trust technology to encourage adoption. That means focussing on measurable outcomes rather than jargon and marketing hype.

I’ll take a look at the road ahead for accelerated tech adoption in my next blog in the new year. Have a great Christmas and see you in 2026!