No CIP auditor flags what never leaves the building.
Electric utilities, oil & gas midstream operators, and water systems use 1331 so field engineering, maintenance triage, and incident response can use AI without a NERC CIP supply-chain finding.
“Responsible entities shall develop one or more documented supply chain cybersecurity risk management plans for high and medium impact BES Cyber Systems, addressing the procurement and installation of vendor software and services, including verification of vendor remote access controls.”
Any AI tool that touches an OT-adjacent network — field engineering logs, maintenance work orders, ICS incident triage — is a third-party software vendor under CIP-013. An outbound API call from that network is a supply-chain risk an auditor must evaluate. TSA's renewed pipeline directives and NIS2 in the EU apply the same logic to oil, gas, water, and digital infrastructure.
“A field engineer used a cloud chatbot to summarize incident logs from a substation. Our SOC caught the outbound traffic. Now CIP compliance has frozen every AI initiative until we can prove the next tool has no internet egress.”
The only posture a CIP auditor will accept without exception: a physical appliance inside the CIP-compliant boundary, with no required outbound connectivity. The same posture satisfies TSA SDs and NIS2 'essential services' obligations.
Compliance by architecture, not by contract footnote.
Air-gap-compatible by design
The appliance runs inside your CIP-compliant network segment with zero required outbound traffic. Signed offline update bundles handle model and software updates without opening egress.
OT-safe deployment topology
Reference architectures for IT-OT DMZ, jump-host integration, and unidirectional gateway patterns. Your ICS team gets a deployment diagram their existing change-control process already knows how to approve.
CIP-013 vendor evidence pack
Pre-built artifacts addressing vendor remote access, software integrity verification, vulnerability disclosure, and incident notification — the questions a CIP audit will ask about the AI vendor on the third-party register.
Workflow-specific agents
Maintenance log summarization, work-order drafting, incident-runbook retrieval, and outage-comms drafting — agents shipped for the actual jobs in the control room and field office, not generic chat.
The decision is rarely one person.
We've built collateral for each seat at the table — from the GC reading the bulletin to the platform lead writing the diagram.
Your regulators don't grade on a curve.
1331 gives a CIP compliance lead an auditor-ready 'no external AI dependencies' answer, an OT security director a network diagram with no internet calls, and a VP of Operations real productivity in the same workflows the SOC was previously blocking.