Global spending in the artificial intelligence (AI) market is expected to increase from US$17.6 billion in 2022 to approximately US$32 billion in 2025 as technologists aim to innovate existing layers of AI.
In the Asia Pacific (Apac) region, advancements in the oil and gas industry are a clear example of how the deployment of next-generational technology is becoming more prevalent, prompting leaders to understand how it impacts business models and operations. For many years, the oil and gas industry failed to embrace innovation and digitalisation, leading to many missed opportunities. However, this is changing as stakeholders’ interests in accumulating significant amounts of data are becoming ways to turn cost centres into profit centres.
Within heavy-weight industries, the exploration, production, and extraction stages can be extremely expensive. This is leading to a shift in mindset from leaders to improve productivity and profitability by streamlining operations and reducing unnecessary costs as required. Today, we continuously observe how technologies like AI have helped industries, such as the oil and gas sector, pinpoint drilling opportunities, inspect pipes for problems with self-navigating robots, and predict equipment wear and tear without breaking the bank.
Conventional AI has transformed processes, yet the use of this AI technology is now the minimum. The next frontier that many large multinationals and businesses are looking towards is how to productively tap their existing data and insights and to leverage cognitive AI during day-to-day operations to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and drive operational benefits.
Compared to conventional AI technology, which acts as a “black box” (it takes a whole bunch of data, churns it, and then comes up with a recommendation), cognitive AI acts as a “glass box” and provides detailed justifications for their suggestions through displaying evidence, risk, confidence, and uncertainty. These justifications are crafted to be easily understood and interpreted by both humans and machines, enabling business leaders to achieve operational efficiency on a larger scale than possible before.
Cognitive AI can help highly regulated industries, like the oil and gas sector, achieve energy transition goals and overcome operational and field constraints. It can also address the technical skill gap caused by an ageing workforce and training challenges related to digitalisation, compliance mandates, training costs, environmental impacts, as well as safety accidents.
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It is no surprise that the oil and gas industry faces a shortage of specialised technical talent, making it crucial to bridge these skills gaps with Cognitive AI. It can help resolve real issues and challenges faced by the industry, particularly in refinery processes.
Therefore, the time is ripe for a historical shift towards closer collaboration between AI and human expertise. How can then the oil and gas industry achieve this, and what does it look like?
Trust and ethical AI
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In order to move towards a truly collaborative model between AI and humans, users of AI need to understand and trust the technology as well as its benefits. There is a prominent barrier to AI adoption due to a lack of trust in the technology—whether that’s a lack of trust in its value or biases and fears about it replacing the workforce, as well as security concerns.
To eliminate AI bias to increase trust and adoption rate, organisations need to leverage glass box AI solutions that provide clear audit trails explaining the reasoning behind recommendations and showing the evidence, risk, and confidence behind decisions. Meanwhile, in the wider ecosystem, big tech firms are coming together to combat ethical issues around AI, especially with commercial uses of AI gaining traction. AI ‘for-good’ initiatives include consortiums and experts leading the charge in providing consultation on where AI can and should be used. The spillover effects of this are beneficial for the adoption of industrial AI within the oil and gas sector.
Building a sustainable workforce in the energy industry
The workforce within the oil and gas sector has always been one that is niche in skills and knowledge. Additionally, the industry has seen many of its senior engineers with the necessary knowledge due for retirement. Hence, it is imperative that these skills gaps are bridged with adequate experience to resolve issues. This is exactly where cognitive AI can be used to resolve real issues and challenges faced by the industry, such as bridging the industrial gap with more efficient training of new engineers and shortening their learning curve.
By implementing explainable AI systems that could emulate human reasoning to understand and resolve problems, decision-makers are better able to derive meaning from these solutions and make pivotal, strategic decisions. Cognitive AI is unique, combining human expertise and experience with documented knowledge that is digitized and codified into a symbolic form – machine-readable and actionable in complex industrial scale systems and processes.
Achieving strategic business goals with Cognitive AI
With demonstrated potential, it is with no doubt that AI has helped refineries adhere to commercial operating plans, capture, and operationalise expert knowledge, reduce production material costs, maximise operational efficiencies, accelerate time to market, and reduce waste in critical downstream oil and gas sectors. Amidst the strong global push towards prioritising sustainability and trends towards adopting industrial technology to meet various goals, there is huge potential for the energy sector in the region to adopt AI solutions.
As businesses discover the value of cutting-edge technologies like Cognitive AI, the optimal path forward involves fully leveraging its value through integration with human expertise and knowledge. Cognitive AI leaders like Beyond Limits will continuously advocate for AI solutions to build trust. True collaboration comes from utilising explainable AI solutions that allow humans to make strategic decisions to achieve their business goals.
Leonard Lee is the president of Apac at Beyond Limits
