Coverage of Brian’s keynote at the Baker Hughes Annual Meeting in Florence, Italy, source: Enlit, Kelvin Ross

Using artificial intelligence to transform the energy sector isn’t about automation – it’s about augmentation, says Brian Solis

An AI digital futurist has urged energy leaders to see the full potential of artificial intelligence and not simply use the technology to cut corners cheaply.

“The future doesn’t belong to companies that use the most AI,” said Brian Solis. “It’s those who reimagine their enterprise for a ‘control-alt-delete moment’ to reboot the human workforce as not just more intelligent, but more capable.”

Speaking to hundreds of power and utility professionals at the Baker Hughes Annual Meeting in the Italian city of Florence, regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance, Solis used that historical landmark in his speech.

“The next industrial Renaissance is giving way to intelligent industry. And intelligent industry isn’t judged by how much AI or technology it uses: it is measured by – and remembered by – how that intelligence is employed.”

Solis is Head of Global Innovation at San Francisco software company ServiceNow and author of several books about using disruptive technologies to affect a change in business mindset, the most recent being Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future.

These were themes he stressed in his speech about utilising artificial intelligence. “The intelligent industry is really about reimagining enterprise, so you have not just AI literacy in the organisation, but AI vision for what the enterprise could be beyond automation.

“If you think about the last 20 years and the evolution of digital transformation, we didn’t really transform… we just digitised yesterday’s work. And research shows that we’re already doing that today with artificial intelligence.”

However, Solis said that realising the potential of AI “isn’t just about automating – this is about augmenting work”.

“This is about doing new work in new ways. Not just yesterday’s work better, or cheaper, or more efficiently – that impedes your ability to compete and impedes your ability to innovate.

Leadership moment

“AI is not a strategy,” he said. “Transformation to do what you couldn’t do yesterday and deliver greater value… that’s a strategy. Technology needs operating, and so do people. That’s why this is a leadership moment.”

He said that many companies are already using AI while others were adopting a wait-and-see approach, but he added that “the companies that will thrive, the companies that will win, will refactor energy to their benefit. They will invest in unlocked energy opportunities at scale, to innovate with artificial intelligence, to augment workers and transform the workforce.”

He said “AI Darwinism” would prove that the companies that succeed will be “more operationally efficient and resilient” by “outsmarting competitors with human and AI collaboration”.

“Nothing interesting begins with knowing,” he concluded. “Innovation does not begin with knowing. This is your moment to rewrite energy… and that takes vision, courage and leadership.”