Shell broadened its work with Microsoft to drive efficiencies across the company from drilling and extraction to employee empowerment and collaboration, as well as safety for its retail customers and employees.
Shell selected C3 IoT with Microsoft Azure as its artificial intelligence (AI) platform to enable digital transformation. Shell will replicate AI and machine learning applications across its upstream and downstream businesses.
Judson Althoff, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business, mentioned:
As one of the energy sector’s largest and most prominent players, Shell’s wide-scale adoption of AI, machine learning and IoT technologies sets an example of how digital transformation can help the industry address resource challenges, improve asset performance and promote safety.
By using the C3 IoT Platform on Microsoft Azure for AI applications, Shell will start with predictive maintenance for more than hundreds of thousands of critical assets globally. It will then expand to support other machine learning, machine vision and natural language processing-based use cases.
Shell has also made progress in two key areas of the business with artificial intelligence tools:
- Shell Geodesic: It improves the accuracy and consistency of a horizontal well’s directional control to reach the most productive layers of rock containing oil and gas. It features a ‘drilling simulator,’ and a suite of tested algorithms to visualize layers of oil and gas rock.
- Shell developed a new cloud-based, deep learning solution built on Microsoft Azure that uses closed-circuit camera footage and Internet of Things technology to identify safety hazards and alert employees.
Finally, to adopt more digital experiences for its workforce, Shell will use three Office 365 communication apps:
- Microsoft Stream, an enterprise video service;
- SharePoint Online, a content collaboration repository;
- Yammer, a corporate social network.
