To say that 2020 has been a tough year for the Energy Industry would be an understatement. The recent leg down in oil prices has wreaked further havoc on an industry that was already struggling to adapt to the current realities of over-supply, technology innovation, and business model advances. The year has been riddled with massive layoffs and early retirement packages, and the industry's personnel exodus is just beginning. In past downturns, layoffs were painful but tolerated because almost everyone affected expected to return when energy prices would bounce back. They were dedicated to the industry and would return to work during the upturns frantically trying to ramp up to meet demand. The Energy Industry has always required a significant amount of specialized skills and knowledge, and also provided a rewarding career for many.  However, with this downturn, many people with the necessary skills and knowledge now consider the Energy Industry unstable, low-tech, and antiquated. The industry's ultra-conservative nature, coupled with its instability and the general unpopularity of the sector, will make it difficult for many companies to attract talent once economics rebound. The inability to operate effectively without critical knowledge and skills is yet another crisis on the horizon for management teams.

Design specifications and countless industry standards have guided the oil industry for years. However, the details of many project implementations often reside only on the hard drives of engineers and managers. In cases where essential data has been collected and archived, the ability to retrieve, interpret, and display the data has been ad-hoc and requires specialized personnel. Furthermore, information management systems have become unwieldy and cumbersome to interpret anything useful from the massive amounts of loosely structured data. Because of this, it is common for companies to need project-specific technical or management personnel to find and analyze data from past projects.

What can energy companies do to help minimize knowledge loss due to brain drain as they lose access to employees with critical knowledge? Enter AI. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not yet capable of replacing employees with specialized design and implementation skills. However, it is a useful tool to analyze large data sets, perceive and react to those data sets, and even learn from those data sets. The time to implement an AI-driven data retrieval and analysis solution is now. Energy companies still have the knowledge needed to help train the AI, but time is running out.

It will be increasingly challenging to find new hires with technical skills as the tech-savvy move onto more stable technology-driven industries. A significant first step in retaining the value of your legacy information is investing in an AI-based information management solution. It doesn't matter if your company still relies on finding information on individual hard drives or if your company has already generated a massive data lake of underutilized information, now is the time to start your program to train machines to search, perceive and analyze your information.

1. Understand the capabilities that are most critical to your business once upturn takes root.

2. Identify where you stand today in terms of data captured, and capabilities still retained.

3. Develop a sense of emerging knowledge gaps that are priority to address.

4. Catalog AI solutions, especially those that are coming from the start-up space.

5. Go through a rigorous evaluation and selection process of these AI solutions, realizing that no one solution is the silver bullet.

Protect your company from critical knowledge loss while you have the ability to do so.  

Would you like to discuss some AI solution options for your company? Let’s connect. Our digital strategist, Rob Lewis, has spent his career focused on providing customer centric software and data driven products and solutions.

As digital continues to drive rapid advancement in the way we do business, very little escapes change. Product development, product delivery, and product support models continue to evolve at a breakneck pace. As once flagship product lines become commodities, many companies now ponder what digital is all about and what it means to their company. As addressed in the previous paper, Survival of the Fittest, digital in a business context can be viewed merely as advancing multiple technologies that work together to allow companies to rethink their products, manufacturing, and services in ways that were not previously possible. One frequently asked question is “where to start?” Whether you are a startup or a Fortune 500 company, one way to begin your digital journey is to redefine the current popular focus on the Three P’s of Management: People, Process, and Product.  A more digital-friendly focus of Management is a mix of People, Process, and Platform.

It is a fascinating time to be working in the era of digital Darwinism, when technology and society are evolving faster than businesses can naturally adapt. With all of the technological changes over the last decade, software and data tools have evolved significantly.  Many companies realize that the game has shifted, and they need a robust digital strategy to compete in the current business climate. However, trying to cope without a thorough understanding of the digital space and how it affects business can threaten even the most successful companies.  All of the technological advancements, especially in the last 20 years, are changing the competitive dynamics across all industries. With business leaders recognizing the seismic shift in technology and sensing a new set of business rules, they fear falling behind their traditional competitors as well as new players entering their space. Companies are now scrambling to adapt their offerings, sometimes without clarity of what they need to do to evolve their current business model. These businesses are operating like a bike rider looking directly in front of their bike to avoid potholes while heading off a cliff. Although, these businesses need to avoid the potholes, they also need a clear, forward-looking vision to avoid the cliff ahead.  This vision should be rooted in a deep understanding of the immense possibilities and designed for speed, so that the competition does not accelerate ahead.