Gabriel Regus’s father was a sharp dresser, a pillar of his community, and a dentist in Washington Heights. During the 1980s and 1990s in New York City, the neighborhood was absorbing thousands of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans who were busy making a new home in a new country. The elder Regus built his dental practice from the ground up right in the heart of this vibrant cultural hub, anchoring himself in the daily lives of his neighbors.
“The energy was incredible,” Regus recalls of those formative years.
What his son remembers most vividly, however, is what happened when a patient walked through the door and simply could not afford to pay. There was no version of that story in which the patient was turned away or shown the door. Instead, his father invariably found another way—whether through offering free care, extending credit on little more than a handshake, or occasionally arranging a straight barter system with a neighbor. For a young boy watching from the front row, these moments amounted to an early and unusually practical education. He learned that tools exist specifically to solve human problems, and that a professional’s skill is never entirely his own to hoard.
“One phrase my father would say was, ‘We made a commitment to our community and country to never stop building,’” Regus says. “I didn’t fully understand that as a child, but I understand it now.”
Four decades later, Regus is applying that exact sentiment to a much larger and more complex piece of infrastructure: the American electric grid.
Today, Regus serves as the senior grid technology development manager at Puget Sound Energy, a major utility in Washington state that provides vital electricity and natural gas services to more than 1.9 million customers. In this high-stakes role, his daily responsibility is to determine which emerging technologies genuinely deserve a coveted spot on a system that operates under the strict mandate of never failing. Alongside this demanding corporate career, he is also the founder of Hispanics in Tech, a dedicated nonprofit organization built from the ground up to increase Hispanic representation, mentorship, and leadership across the broader technology sector. On a traditional resume, these two high-level roles might initially look unrelated or even divergent. To Regus, however, they represent the exact same fundamental work.
The timing of his work in the energy sector is far from incidental. After nearly two decades of relatively flat energy consumption nationwide, electricity demand across the United States is climbing rapidly once again. Modern utilities are facing a monumental balancing act: they must simultaneously modernize aging grid infrastructure, absorb a massive influx of distributed energy resources, harden systems against escalating wildfire risks, support the rapid electrification of both transportation and residential and commercial buildings, and handle the soaring power loads brought on by artificial intelligence infrastructure. Crucially, they must accomplish all of this under intense, unyielding affordability pressure. Every single one of these macro-level forces eventually lands on someone’s desk as a concrete decision regarding what technologies to buy, build, or bet on for the long term.
“As utilities face rising demand, grid modernization, wildfire risk, electrification, AI, distributed energy resources, and affordability pressure, they need better systems for deciding which technologies to pursue, how to evaluate them, and how to scale what works,” Regus explains.
At Puget Sound Energy, Regus oversees the intricate pilot-to-production process. This is the critical pipeline that carries a nascent idea from its very first conversation through rigorous evaluation, field trials, and—if it successfully survives the gauntlet—into daily operational deployment. He describes the role as being something very close to an internal innovation consultant, with a sweeping portfolio that spans grid modernization, distributed energy resources, reliability enhancements, wildfire risk mitigation, and modern data platforms.
“We’re talking about technology that could provide situational awareness for wildfires or increase reliability for our customers,” he notes. “It runs such a wide range, and it’s such an incredible opportunity to highlight that innovation exists here.”
That vast operational range is precisely the point, and it is also what makes utility innovation its own distinct discipline—one that is vastly different from the fast-moving startup culture most people picture when they hear the word "innovation."
“Innovation inside a utility is different because we have immediate access to the real problems facing the grid,” Regus says. “The challenge in utility innovation isn’t simply imagining new ideas.”
Ideas, he points out, have grown remarkably cheap in the modern era.
“Ideas are easy in the age of AI,” he says. “The next era of utility innovation will require more than pilots and PowerPoints. It will require structured intelligence, better decision-making, cross-functional alignment, and systems that help utilities turn emerging technology into measurable outcomes.”
It is a sharper claim than it might sound at first. Utilities are certainly not short on creative innovation; rather, they are often short on the crucial connective tissue that links innovation to everyday operations. This missing tissue includes streamlined intake processes, rigorous evaluation criteria, honest business cases, and a reliable handoff from the specialized team that ran a pilot project to the operations team that has to live with the real-world result at two o’clock in the morning. Pilots are comparatively easy to start and remarkably easy to strand. Throughout his career, Regus has deliberately built his professional path at the exact seam where those promising projects tend to get stranded.
The Habit of Building It Yourself
Just before the global disruptions of the COVID-19 lockdown, Regus made a bold decision: he wanted to understand software engineering from the inside out, rather than simply managing software projects from a safe distance. He sought out an intensive software development course at Columbia University and immediately got to work building functional applications. It was a classic mid-career pivot, with a seasoned utility manager learning the ins and outs of an entirely second profession, largely because his first profession kept surfacing complex operational problems that raw code could uniquely solve.
It is a revealing move that speaks volumes about his character. When confronted with a glaring gap in systems or knowledge, Regus’s natural instinct is never to sit back and write a bureaucratic memo about the gap. His instinct is to roll up his sleeves and build the solution himself.
That very same hands-on instinct is what ultimately produced his nonprofit venture. While he was busy learning to code and studying software architecture, he kept paying close attention to who else was sitting in the room with him—and, just as importantly, who was conspicuously absent.
“I was disappointed at the lack of Hispanics I saw in tech,” he says. “It made me think about my values and where I came from. I’ve gone to conferences and meetings at large technology companies, and similar organizations, the last few years, and it just reinforced that people like me didn’t inherit pathways for how to establish a career in tech. The infrastructure in our communities is just a little bit different, and it made me committed to lifting up that next generation.”
The operative word in his assessment is inherit. Regus’s diagnosis of the broader pipeline problem begins well before anyone ever sits down for their first corporate job interview, and it is certainly not a diagnosis rooted in a lack of ambition or talent. Educators in Hispanic communities, he points out, are frequently unequipped with the necessary tools, corporate exposure, or clear pathways needed to point a promising, scientifically minded student toward a thriving career in technology. The talent was never the constraint. The map was.
Hispanics in Tech was built explicitly to shorten that distance. By design, the vast majority of its programming and resources are offered completely free of charge. The organization’s natural center of gravity is students and early-career professionals, though Regus remains just as interested in pulling seasoned executives and entrepreneurs onto the platform to voice what the community actually needs on the ground. He strongly prefers that the organization not be mischaracterized as a traditional, superficial networking group.
“Most of our programs are free because access matters,” he says. “Over the next few years, success for Hispanics in Tech means expanding technical literacy across fields like AI, fintech, energy tech, and other emerging industries.”
What Translates
When asked what fundamentally connects a neighborhood dental practice, an engineering career, a rigorous coding course, a high-stakes utility innovation portfolio, and a growing nonprofit organization, Regus lands immediately on a single defining word: translation.
“My superpower is that I can translate between worlds: engineering, software, operations, vendors, customers, communities, and emerging technology,” he says. “I understand both the technical side of innovation and the human side of change.”
That remarkable capacity has a deep source, and Regus does not locate it inside a traditional corporate classroom or a university lecture hall.
“While all of those experiences are important, I still consider my Hispanic background pivotal in helping me navigate the innovation space,” he says. “It makes you see challenges in a different light, and it makes you want to roll up your sleeves and make things happen yourself.”
The lessons learned in Washington Heights years ago turned out to be remarkably portable. Whether he is working directly with an external vendor, an internal utility stakeholder, or the diverse communities that his utility serves, Regus always tries to step into someone else’s shoes before he attempts to fix anything—mirroring the exact empathetic approach his father once practiced across a dental chair. Throughout his professional life, he has frequently found himself positioned as one of the only Hispanic professionals in the room, a unique vantage point that has occasionally made him feel like an ambassador for an entirely different corner of American life. Rather than viewing this as an anomaly or a burden, he chooses to see it as a significant professional asset, pointing to the cultural intelligence, customer empathy, and lived experience that Hispanic professionals consistently bring into any corporate organization.
“My leadership style is rooted in empathy, practicality, and meeting people where they are,” he says. “I believe trust is built by listening first, understanding the real constraint, and then helping people move toward a solution.”
Meeting people where they are functions as a profound leadership philosophy. In his hands, however, it also serves as an essential design philosophy. Enterprise software fails most often not because the underlying technology is flawed, but because it fundamentally ignores the reality of how human beings actually work in their daily routines.
An Outstanding Commitment
This realization is precisely why Regus is increasingly unwilling to solve systemic industry problems one utility at a time. The widening distance between a promising new technology and genuine operational value, he argues, is not merely a Puget Sound Energy problem or a localized Washington state issue. It is a structural, industry-wide challenge, and it is the exact sort of problem that gets fixed by building something tangible rather than convening yet another endless working group. True to form, he is doing what he has done at every previous major juncture in his life: learning the domain deeply, and then building the necessary tool.
“This is a unique time to be in the energy industry because demand is increasing, the grid is evolving, and utilities need creative solutions to meet the moment,” he says. “I have some ideas about how we can make things easier for people in the energy sector, which will, in turn, make life better for our customers. I think tech can be part of the solution, but I live by the code that technology is only valuable when it improves lives.”
For the younger generation he is actively trying to reach and mentor, his practical advice is unglamorous and specific: a solid foundation in the hard sciences, combined with even a basic working knowledge of coding, opens a startling number of doors in the modern economy.
“The energy industry is changing, and Hispanic professionals should know there are real opportunities in utilities, infrastructure, climate tech, and energy innovation,” Regus says.
His father built a practice that an entire neighborhood could lean on in times of need. Today, Regus is working on building infrastructure of an entirely different kind—spanning power grids, pipelines of talent, and resilient systems for deciding what is truly worth building in the first place. The foundational commitment his father named, rooted in a dedication to community, country, and a promise to never stop building, was first expressed inside a busy dental office in Washington Heights. As far as his son is concerned, that commitment is still actively outstanding.
