The transition toward smart and more resilient energy systems has become increasingly urgent as electricity grids confront climate change, rapid industrialization, and rising demand. This transition has seen a significant increase in the integration of renewable energy and an increase in the complexity of managing the grid. Thus, predictive analytics is widely promoted as a digital innovation to address this complexity by generating rich insights,providing real-time visibility, and enabling monitoring in smart grids. Yet its adoption remains shaped by stakeholders’ thoughts on its role and value in smart grid operations. This thesis examines the interplay between stakeholder expectations and thoughts on the adoption of predictive analytics in smart grids,focusing on how such expectations are constructed, aligned, and enacted across organizational and institutional contexts. Drawing on Organizing Vision Theory as its primary theoretical lens, the study conceptualizes predictive analytics not only as a technical capability but as a socially embedded innovation whose adoption depends on shared interpretations, legitimacy, and coordinated action. This thesis investigates how policymakers, grid operators,market actors, and energy users interpret the value and role of predictive analytics in the smart grid, and how their expectations of what predictive analytics is shapes thoughts on adoption. Based on an embedded single-case study conducted within the Swedish smart grid context, the findings show that predictive analytics often diffuses through compelling visions that align managerial aspirations, vendor narratives, and policy priorities, amid divergent expectations and institutional logics. By foregrounding expectations as a central analytical object, this thesis contributes to research on digital innovation in complex socio-technical systems and offers insights into how predictive analytics can be adopted and operationalized in the smart grid. At the same time, it highlights how unresolved tensions among stakeholder expectations continue to shape thoughts on adoption, underscoring the importance of collective sensemaking and institutional alignment in the evolution of smart grids.