This sector is surrounded by challenges; the world is looking for new energy sources and everyone's focus is on increased sustainability, while oil and gas prices are volatile. It’s a strong imperative to make fundamental changes. AI and analytics are critical to succeed with digital transformation and essential parts of the modernization journey.
AI and analytics have the potential to cut costs and unlock efficiencies across the oil and gas value chain, help reduce risk and downtimes, increase control, and ensure higher profitability. Through intelligent data analysis, energy companies can make well-informed decisions that make it easier to determine where to drill by utilizing seismographic data, to come up with better predictions that increase profits and to automate a large number of processes.
Preserving cash in focus
“During these uncertain times, companies are mainly focusing on preserving cash by optimizing inventory positions, suppliers’ payment terms and reducing receivables terms”, says Anoop Sharma, who is leading Cognizant’s Nordic AI and analytics practice.
Leaders are applying operational efficiencies by reductions in operations and maintenance costs, better operations planning for improved production, yield optimization, and by automating engineering and supply chain operations using AI.
Energy companies can also improve quality of service and operations by minimizing NCRs (non-conformance reports) based on data patterns across historic logs related to vendor performance and operations data, machine data, IoT and sensor data in online and offline format by utilizing knowledge management and graph data methods.
Further, companies are improving demand forecasting and reduction in operations downtime and losses by effective use of asset data, condition-based monitoring, digital twins, remote operations and control centers.
“Companies are also utilizing drone or ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle) images together with video analytics, striving to automate quality inspections and cumbersome manual processes and tasks”, says Anoop Sharma.
Modernizing digital platforms
How do you make AI happen then? Leaders globally, as well as in the Nordics, are focusing on building a modern data ecosystem and a digital core by modernizing their legacy systems. This means moving to the cloud, creating coherent stories by joining the dots between silos of data and by enriching new data sources, using un-utilized dark data and applying industry-specific machine learning models, image analytics and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) techniques.
As one of the major data and AI consultancy organizations in the world, with over 400 AI experts in the Nordics alone, Cognizant works to operationalize and implement data, AI, and analytics solutions at some of the world’s biggest companies.