AI and energy have symbiotic ties: Chevron India head

US oil major Chevron last year invested about $1 billion to start its engineering and innovation excellence centre (ENGINE) in Bengaluru to streamline its operations and use AI to improve accuracy. Akshay Sahni, country head, Chevron India, in an interview with Avik Das, says that Al and energy have a symbiotic relationship as the former is needed more than ever to meet the growing demand for energy globally.

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Edited excerpts:

What are some of the most impactful works that happened from this facility over the last one year? = As part of the journey of the oil wells, wells have to be plugged and abandoned once they run their useful life.

Generating a plug and abandonment program in the past used to take months because the well that was drilled many years ago, everything was handwritten and typed. Getting all the information and then developing a programme on how to abandon it, all of that process would take months. Now with artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, we can read all these old documents and address the queries we have far more efficiently. Almost 60-70 per cent of such programmes can now be done automatically. For the rest, we have a human in the loop. This entire solution is now being developed out of this technology centre.