Energy giant BP has made huge investments in digital innovation in the last few years, and according to reports out of last week’s Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, the firm’s executives say it is reaping billions of dollars in returns as a result, both in savings and new revenue opportunities.
The investment areas have run the gamut from digital twins and artificial intelligence (AI) to robots and more effective technology for exploration of oil and alternative energy sources. According to reporting by the Journal of Petroleum Technology, fundamental to all of these changes within BP has been the internal disruption of the status quo of how oil and gas companies traditionally operated:
“To retain and attract the best talent in the world, in our industry and outside our industry, we had to change several things about how we do work,” said Ian Cavanagh, head of modernization and transformation at BP, noting that without getting this human element right, “we’re in trouble.”
Transforming BP meant that executives would have to put their weight behind an effort to root out the traditional oil and gas decision-making processes that Cavanaugh recognized as “slow and quite cumbersome.” In their place today are approaches described as “agile,” a word that has risen to become a cornerstone principle of today’s management methodology.
