“When you ask somebody in 10 years’ time, ‘Who is your most trusted colleague at work?’ the answer may be ‘My bot,’” says Malcolm Frank.

Excerpts from Hart Energy’s article:

“To those who fear that the next wave of oil and gas technology—artificial intelligence (AI)—will bring uncertainty to the industry and devour jobs ... well, it will but get used to it. The more it is adopted, the more the industry and its workers will benefit.

‘We think this is the great story of our time,’ said Malcolm Frank, executive vice president of strategy and marketing for Cognizant, in his keynote at OTC’s opening session on Monday, May 6. AI, he said, will join the loom of the first industrial revolution, the steam engine of the second and the assembly line of the third as the engine driving the fourth industrial revolution.

The robots, he emphasized, aren’t coming. They are already here, surrounding us in the worlds of retail, sports and industries relying on high tech, such as air- line manufacturers. In oil and gas, however, not so much.

‘The good news is you’re late to the party, and that’s not a critique,’ Frank said. ‘It’s just the nature of your industry structure. You actually can use all these different industries as petri dishes—your little R&D labs—to figure out what works well, what doesn’t work and then apply them to the energy sector.’

The opportunity for offshore oil and gas is particularly apparent. A typical platform, he said, incorporates almost 33,000 data points. However, only 2% of them today are instrumented.”

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