Gabriel Regus’s father was a sharp dresser, a pillar of his community, and a dentist who operated out of Washington Heights. In the New York City of the 1980s and 1990s, the neighborhood was absorbing thousands of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans who were 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 transition, serving families striving for a fresh start.
“The energy was incredible,” Regus recalls, looking back at a formative period of his childhood.
What the younger Regus remembers most vividly, however, is what happened when a patient walked through the door and simply could not pay for their treatment. There was no version of that scenario in which a patient was turned away or shown the door. His father always managed to find another way forward. It might mean providing free care, extending credit on the strength of little more than a handshake, or occasionally engaging in a straight barter arrangement with a neighbor. For a young boy watching from the front row, observing these daily interactions amounted to an early and unusually practical education. It taught him that practical tools exist to solve fundamental 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 the complex infrastructure of the American electric grid.
Today, Regus serves as the senior grid technology development manager at Puget Sound Energy, the major Washington state utility that supplies electricity and natural gas to more than 1.9 million customers. In this demanding role, his daily responsibility is to determine which emerging technologies deserve a place on a critical system that simply cannot afford to fail. Simultaneously, he is the founder of Hispanics in Tech, a dedicated nonprofit organization built to increase Hispanic representation, mentorship, and leadership across the broader technology sector.
Viewed side-by-side on a résumé, these two prominent roles might initially appear unrelated. But Regus describes them as fundamentally the same work: identifying systemic gaps, building reliable pathways, and ensuring that essential tools reach the people who need them most.
The timing of his work in the energy sector is far from incidental. After nearly two decades of flat, predictable consumption, electricity demand across the United States is climbing upward 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 buildings, and field the massive, continuous power loads that modern artificial intelligence infrastructure demands—all while operating under genuine, unrelenting affordability pressure.
Every single one of these sweeping macroeconomic and technological forces eventually lands on someone’s desk as a concrete business and operational decision about what to buy, what to build, and what to bet on.
“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 rigorous pilot-to-production process. This is the critical pipeline that carries an innovative idea from an initial conversation through careful evaluation and field trials, and—if it successfully survives the gauntlet—into daily operational deployment. He describes his position as being akin to an internal innovation consultant. His expansive portfolio spans grid modernization, distributed energy resources, operational reliability, wildfire risk mitigation, and advanced data platforms.
“We’re talking about technology that could provide critical 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 functional range is the entire point, and it is also what makes utility innovation its own distinct discipline—one that is markedly different from the fast-moving startup culture that 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 and more pragmatic claim than it might first sound. Utilities are rarely short on innovative concepts; rather, they frequently struggle with the connective tissue bridging innovation and daily operations. This includes the intake process, the evaluation criteria, the honest business case, and the delicate handoff from the team that ran the pilot 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 launch and remarkably easy to strand. Regus has built a career precisely at the seam where those initiatives often get stranded.
The Habit of Building It Yourself
Just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, Regus decided he wanted to understand software engineering from the inside rather than simply managing it from a distance. He actively sought out a software development course at Columbia University and immediately set to work building applications. It was a classic mid-career utility manager learning the ins and outs of an entirely second profession, largely because his first profession kept surfacing complex operational problems that custom code could solve.
It is a revealing move. When confronted with a persistent gap, Regus’s instinct is never to write a memo about the gap; it is to learn the tools required to close it.
That same pragmatic instinct is what ultimately produced his nonprofit organization. While he was studying software development, he kept noticing who else was in the classroom—and just as importantly, who was missing.
“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 talent pipeline problem begins well before anyone’s first job interview, and it is explicitly not a diagnosis about personal ambition. Educators working within Hispanic communities, he notes, are frequently unequipped with the necessary tools, exposure, or clear pathways to point a promising student toward a viable technology career. The talent was never the missing constraint. The map was.
Hispanics in Tech was built specifically to shorten that distance. By design, the vast majority of its programming is offered free of charge. Its primary center of gravity is students and early-career professionals, though Regus is equally interested in pulling established executives and entrepreneurs onto the platform to voice what the community genuinely needs. He prefers that the initiative not be mischaracterized as a simple 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 connects a neighborhood dental practice, an engineering career, an intensive coding course, a utility innovation portfolio, and a growing nonprofit, Regus effortlessly lands on a single unifying 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 capacity has a distinct source, and Regus does not locate it in any formal classroom.
“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 vital lesson learned in Washington Heights turned out to be remarkably portable. Whether he is collaborating with an external vendor, an internal utility stakeholder, or the diverse communities his employer serves, Regus always tries to step into someone else’s shoes before attempting to fix anything—mirroring the exact approach his father once practiced across a dental chair. Throughout his professional life, he has often found himself as one of the very few Hispanic professionals in the room, a position that has occasionally cast him as an informal ambassador for a different corner of American life. He strongly prefers that this position be viewed as a distinct asset rather than a statistical anomaly, pointing to the cultural intelligence, customer empathy, and lived experience that Hispanic professionals bring to any 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 serves as a guiding leadership philosophy. In his hands, it also operates as an effective design philosophy. Enterprise software fails most often not because the underlying technology is fundamentally flawed, but because it completely ignores how human beings actually work in the real world.
An Outstanding Commitment
This realization is precisely why Regus is increasingly unwilling to solve systemic issues on a purely piecemeal basis, one utility at a time. The yawning distance between a promising technology and real operational value, he argues, is neither a Puget Sound Energy problem nor a local Washington state problem. It is structural, it is entirely industry-wide, and it requires building functional solutions rather than convening yet another endless working group. True to form, he is doing what he has done at every previous professional juncture: learning the domain thoroughly, 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 working so hard to reach, his practical advice is refreshingly unglamorous and specific: establishing a solid foundation in the hard sciences, combined with even a modest background in 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 once built a dental practice that an entire neighborhood could lean on during times of need. Today, Gabriel Regus is working on building infrastructure of an entirely different kind—securing power grids, establishing durable pipelines of talent, and designing better systems for deciding what is actually worth building in the first place. The foundational commitment his father spoke of, dedicated to the community, the country, and the imperative to never stop building, was forged long ago in a busy office in Washington Heights. As far as his son is concerned, that commitment remains very much outstanding.
