As told by Jillian Ambrose in the UK Daily Telegraph, the recent Financial Times Digital Energy conference heard Total CIO Frederic Gimenez expound on the French major’s ‘complete shift’ from its traditional energy activities to ‘investigating artificial intelligence and machine learning.’ Total is in talks with Google and Microsoft to develop bespoke artificial intelligence technology for the energy sector.
Gimenez told the conference ‘We have a strong knowledge of exploration and seismic analysis. But they [Microsoft and Google] are the best in artificial intelligence. This has obliged our people to work with completely different partners and to merge our knowledge to find a new way to make oil and gas discoveries. Total is still exploring the digital market before moving into any formal partnerships with a Silicon Valley company.’
The conference website includes some frothy post conference quotes, ‘Data is the new currency’ (Susana Quintana-Plaza, E.ON), or maybe ‘Data is the new oil’ (Rolf Riemenschneider European Commission) and, from Shell’s Alisa Choong, ‘Let’s harness the passion and will of all to realize the value from digitalization.’ For a more prosaic take on Total’s AI/ML read or reread our report from the 2017 EAGE workshop on data science.