Will Oil, Gas Companies Ramp Up Their Use of Generative AI in 2024?

Will oil and gas companies ramp up their use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in 2024? And are some oil and gas companies reluctant to implement generative AI technology?

Those were the questions Rigzone posed to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which describes itself as the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, and CruxOCM, which describes itself as the future of autonomous control room operations.

“We anticipate the adoption of generative AI to increase across all industries in the coming year, including the energy and oil and gas industry,” Joseph Santamaria, the Director of Solutions Architecture for Energy and Utilities at AWS, told Rigzone, responding to the questions.

“While it’s still early days and the industry is working to define the potential impact of this transformative technology, many organizations are working with decades worth of valuable data that can be used to enhance exploration, drilling, and production operations, helping to reduce costs, risk, and carbon footprint,” he added.

“We are encouraged by what we’re seeing and hearing from our customers, with a large majority looking at adopting generative AI at some level. We have many customers quickly embracing the technology and actively developing secure generative AI enterprise capabilities, and others working on a wide range of proof of concept projects,” Santamaria went on to state.

Responding only to Rigzone’s first question, the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of CruxOCM, Vicki Knott, said, “the acceleration of innovation is bound to happen as oil and gas companies increasingly leverage new technologies”.

“This could be seen in a sense of a Microsoft co-pilot integration, where it could speed up PowerPoints and document creation,” Knott added.

“Having a technology like this not only expedites the creation of presentations and documents but also revolutionizes data queries, signaling a dynamic shift towards efficiency and advanced automation in the industry,” the CruxOCM CEO went on to state.

AWS has worked with several energy companies, including Baker Hughes, BP, TC Energy, Marathon Oil, Halliburton, ExxonMobil, Cepsa, Shell, and Hess, the company’s website shows.

Knott has extensive knowledge within heavy industry and energy, CruxOCM’s site notes. Roger Shirt, CruxOCM’s other co-founder, is described on the company’s site as an industrial automation veteran with over 25 years of domain expertise in the energy sector. Previously, Shirt was CEO of a company that worked to automate hundreds of field sites across North America, CruxOCM’s site states.

Generative AI at BP and Shell

BP recently announced that it will be “expanding the use of generative AI to enhance its global employee experience through the use of copilot for Microsoft 365”.

“BP is the one of the first companies globally to act as a launch partner for the ‘intelligent AI assistant’,” the company said in a release posted on its website, adding that it will be able to roll out access at scale across a substantial part of its global workforce from early 2024.

“By using the capabilities of copilot for Microsoft 365, BP can help employees to boost productivity, upskill, enhance business performance, and support innovation,” BP added in the release.

“BP may also offer insights that may help shape the future functionality of the product,” it went on to state.

In an on-stage interview at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, last month, which was attended by Rigzone, Shell’s Head of Artificial Intelligence, Amy Challen, sat down with Tom Lee-Devlin, the Global Business Correspondent at The Economist, to talk about the company’s experience with generative artificial intelligence.

“We’ve had an AI program for quite some years, and we’ve actually had a generative AI program as well,” Challen revealed in the interview.

“Obviously it wasn’t as big, and the capabilities weren’t there, but for example we’ve been experimenting with large language models for years because we reckon it’s a much, much, better way of leveraging our knowledge assets,” Challen added.

Profound Impact

In June, Hussein Shel, the Director, Chief Technologist, and Head of Upstream for Energy and Utilities at AWS, revealed to Rigzone that AWS believes generative AI will have a profound impact across industries.

“We are now going to see the next wave of widespread adoption of machine learning, with the opportunity for every customer experience and application to be reinvented with generative AI, including the energy industry,” Shel told Rigzone at the time.

“AWS will help drive this next wave by making it easy, practical, and cost-effective for customers to use generative AI in their business across all the three layers of the technology stack, including infrastructure, machine learning tools, and purpose-built AI services,” he added.

To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com