Pump to Plug – Part V: Why AI Changes Tier 2 Before It Changes Anything Else

Brad Juhasz

• January 25, 2026

Most conversations about AI in EV charging start in the wrong place.  They start with dashboards. With smarter alerts. With better visualizations. Or with the promise that automation will finally reduce the burden on already stretched support teams.

All of those efforts have merit. None of them address where the reliability battle is actually won or lost.

EV charging reliability does not fail for lack of data in the system. It fails because much of the most diagnostic data remains trapped inside the charger where it is accessible to OEMs but not exposed to the CSMS platforms or human operators responsible for Tier 2 and Tier 3 decisions.

As a result, the system routinely asks people to make high‑consequence decisions with partial visibility. That gap—between what exists and what is visible—is not a hardware problem. It is not a UX problem. It is a decision‑latency and decision‑confidence problem.

In a separate post, I laid out how we define Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 support and services, and why those distinctions matter when reliability is treated as a systems problem. I won’t rehash those definitions here. Instead, this article focuses on