Baker Hughes Enters Three-Way Deal to Boost AI in the Oilfield
Houston
oilfield service company Baker Hughes has entered into a three-way agreement
and partnership to boost the adoption of artificial intelligence technology in
the oil and natural gas industry.
Baker
Hughes, tech giant Microsoft and Silicon Valley artificial intelligence company
C3.ai have signed an agreement to work together to develop and deploy the
cost-cutting technology for industry customers across the globe, the companies
announced on Tuesday morning.
"Companies
that adopt this technology will be the next Amazon and those that don't adopt
will be the next Sears," C3.ai founder and CEO Tom Siebel told the Houston
Chronicle.
The
agreement comes less than six months after Baker Hughes and C3.ai launched a
joint venture to deploy artificial intelligence in the oil patch. The two will
now be augmenting the technology they developed using Microsoft’s cloud computing
platform Azure.
Seeking
to get ahead of the coming digital transformation in the oil and natural gas
industry, Baker Hughes CEO Lorenzo Simonelli said artificial intelligence will
make the oil field safer and more reliable. The partnership between the three
companies, he said, allows each company to focus on their individual areas of
expertise.
“It’s
very tough for an industrial company to be a software company and it’s very
tough for a software company to have the domain experience of an industrial
company, and it’s very tough to be at the cutting edge of artificial
intelligence," Simonelli said. "When you bring together these three
companies, you get a capability that helps our customers be successful. That’s
what is so powerful about this combination.”
Currently
making roughly a tenth of its $23 billion in annual revenue from digital
products, Baker Hughes is investing into artificial intelligence and other
technologies ahead of a global energy transition where natural gas and
tech-dependent renewables such as wind and solar will make up a larger
percentage of the power generation mix.
Baker
Hughes, Microsoft and C3.ai are betting that artificial intelligence and cloud
computing will allow oil and natural gas customers to reduce the amount of
computer equipment needed on site by storing and processing data on distant
servers in addition to making operations more efficient, better predicting
maintenance needs, improving safety and lowering costs.
European
oil major Royal Dutch Shell has already signed up as a customer for C3.ai's
artificial intelligence platform on Azure. As an early adopter of the
technology, Shell is using artificial intelligence to monitor its operations
around the world to optimize flows of oil and natural gas as well as better
predict when equipment needs repairs.
"We fundamentally believe that artificial intelligence is the technology that will allow the energy industry to become sustainable, safer and cleaner," Microsoft Executive Vice President Judson Althoff told the Houston Chronicle.