BP turns to AI for advice on oil and gas exploration

Engineers at BP will be expected to make faster decisions using AI-generated advice about oil and gas exploration after the energy company struck a deal with an American technology specialist.
The oil major will use artificial intelligence software developed by the Colorado-based Palantir Technologies to improve and speed up human decision-making with suggested courses of actions based on an automated analysis of data.
The technology will be used to enhance an existing model-based twin of BP’s oil and gas production activity, which was created in partnership with Palantir.
The model allows BP’s physical assets to be recreated as digital assets, which are overlaid with real-time data from more than two million sensors into a single operating picture.
Sunjay Pandey, senior vice-president for digital delivery at BP, said that the deal with Palantir reflected “the digital transformation of BP’s operations”, which would enhance operational performance. The value of the contract has not been disclosed.
Palantir, which was co-founded in 2002 by Peter Thiel, 56, the Silicon Valley billionaire who also co-founded PayPal, builds platforms for managing and securing data and creates applications for machine-assisted analysis. Last year Palantir was awarded a £330 million five-year contract to manage the data of millions of NHS patients. Its technology promises to improve medical records by allowing information on patients to be shared between different parts of the health service.
Palantir’s customers include the US government and it counts the CIA as an early investor. Its shares have leapt by 83 per cent since the start of the year as it benefits from an increase in sales driven by AI. It has a market valuation of about $68 billion and is set to join the S&P 500 index of America’s most valuable companies this month after the latest quarterly weighting change. The move will come into effect on September 23.
Palantir has improved its revenue outlook twice this year as companies sign up to its platform, which it claims “makes artificial intelligence capabilities useful to large institutions”.
Shares in Palantir jumped by $4.04, or 13.3 per cent, to $34.37 in lunchtime trading in New York. BP’s shares rose by a penny, or 0.2 per cent, to 406¾p at the close in London.
Dan Ives, a technology analyst at Wedbush Securities, said: “We believe this is the start of a multi-year cycle for Palantir to continue generating significant deal flow on the back of AIP [its artificial intelligence platform] as more organisations look to add AI capabilities that provide value and innovation in real time across operations that are unique to each enterprise.”