Workforce development |


Airwave bridges the skills gap


As hydropower faces a growing skills gap and retiring workforce, Airwave’s AI platform offers a way to capture and share critical expertise on the front lines. CEO Pankaj Prasad explains how the tool is transforming technician support – bringing decades of knowledge into the hands of the next generation


IN A WORLD INCREASINGLY reliant on digital transformation, one emerging tool promises to bridge the widening knowledge gap in technical industries – Airwave. At its heart is founder and CEO Pankaj Prasad, whose background spans roles at Zoom and Salesforce, but whose passion lies in the garage, wrench in hand, fixing cars and motorcycles. That duality between high- tech environments and hands-on mechanical work seeded the idea for Airwave – an AI-driven platform designed specifically for technicians in the field. “When I walk into my garage, I have nothing to help me be better at fixing things,” Prasad explains. “At work I have all these amazing digital tools. But as a mechanic, I’m looking through PDFs, forums, or hoping someone on YouTube has done the same thing.” For industries like hydropower – facing both a


Pankaj Prasad, CEO, Airwave


retiring workforce and a scarcity of young recruits – Airwave could become a vital bridge between generations of knowledge and practice.


Making technology speak the


technician’s language Airwave’s foundation lies in one crucial technological breakthrough: language understanding. “AI is a broad term,” Prasad explains. “But the way I describe it to our customers is: the breakthrough is that computers can now understand our language. For the past 40 years, in order to talk to a computer, you had to write code. Then for the last 10, you didn’t need code, but you still had to navigate complex forms, click here, click there. Now? You just talk.”


This concept is at the core of Airwave. The platform


resembles a messaging app – intentionally modelled after familiar tools like iMessage or Microsoft Teams. It’s designed to be instantly intuitive, particularly for technicians who don’t want to learn a new system from scratch. “We didn’t want them to have to learn how to use a new app,” says Prasad. “What makes Airwave different is it has this giant purple button in Jarvis.” Jarvis, Airwave’s AI assistant, responds to spoken commands. A technician facing an unfamiliar situation – say, an E1 error on a Daikin VRV3 outdoor condenser – can simply hit the button and ask: “What is an E1 error code on a Daikin VRV3 outdoor condenser unit?” Jarvis will then scan all relevant documentation, videos, manuals, and internal data, and respond with a quick, actionable answer.


While that kind of functionality is useful, Airwave goes a step further – allowing users to capture what Prasad calls “tribal knowledge.”


“A lot of how things work isn’t in the manual,” he


explains. “It’s tribal knowledge – things people learn over time. Like: wait two minutes before you power back on or you’ll blow the board. That’s not in the book.” Technicians can share this information within


Airwave’s discussion channels, creating a living knowledge base that grows over time. “It compounds,” Prasad says. “You can add that to Jarvis. So not only does it pull from documentation, but it evolves as your team goes out and works on things.” This collaborative element is key, especially in industries like hydropower, where decades of hard- earned experience are at risk of disappearing.


Bridging generations “In these industries, there are folks who’ve been doing


it for 30 years. They know everything. And then there are folks coming in who are completely new,” Prasad comments. “You can’t get this training at university or in trade schools. It just doesn’t exist.” One customer, faced with this very challenge, considered hiring a video crew to follow senior technicians for two weeks to document their expertise. The idea was quickly dropped when the technicians, understandably, didn’t want to be on camera. “Instead, they used Airwave,” Prasad says.


“Technicians started asking questions, and those with experience just hit the button and answered. It’s simple.” Airwave is also designed to eliminate one of the biggest barriers to learning: fear. “People are afraid of asking dumb questions. They don’t want to look incompetent in front of their supervisor,” says Prasad.


22 | May 2025 | www.waterpowermagazine.com


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