Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more
The No. 1 way AI is changing 150-year-old energy giant Chevron? How technical practitioners engage with data.
Offshore in the Gulf, Chevron is drilling for oil resources miles below the ocean floor in pockets and reservoirs that may or may not yield results. Agentic architectures need to be able to process petabytes of critical data — which not only provides insights on where to drill, but how to do so without negatively impacting human lives or the environment — in the cloud and at the edge.
“Data is the ultimate accelerant for all of our AI use cases,” Steve Bowman, GM for enterprise AI at Chevron, said onstage at this year’s VB Transform. “It’s something that we’ve embraced in a big way.”
How AI is changing the way Chevron interacts with its untold amounts of data
In 2019, Chevron teamed up with Microsoft and oilfield services company SLB in a project called ‘Triple Crown’ to modernize and standardize cloud-based tools. The three companies have built Azure-native apps into SLB’s DELFI* cognitive exploration and protection (E&P) to help Chevron process, visualize, interpret and gain meaningful insights from multiple data sources. DELFI* E&P covers exploration, development, production and midstream environments.
The $250 billion energy giant with 1,000s of employees in 180 countries worldwide has “an enormous amount of data out there,” said Bowman. And, while Chevron has “very robust systems of record,” large amounts of unstructured data have existed in a variety of share points.
Over the years, Chevron has built some “really great algorithms” that have traditionally been run at small scale on-premises, he explained. However, there has been an increasing push to scale up, running those algorithms at a much larger scale and more efficiently in the cloud.
By doing that, “instead of looking at one three-mile-by-three-mile block in the Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of America, we can look at much larger areas we’re trying to operate on,” he said.
The Microsoft-SLB collaboration has focused on three products: FDPlan, DrillPlan and DrillOps. FDPlan utilizes high-performance computing (HP …