Amin Hassan Nasser, President and CEO of Saudi Aramco at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2025, where leaders came together for a week of discussions under the theme “Collaboration for Intelligent Age”, shared his views on how AI as a transformative force is transforming the energy industry, how AI experts are helping in the transformation of the industries and more.
Artificial Intelligence is a transformative force not only for the energy industry but for all industries. The energy industry in particular receives humongous amount of data daily from seismic, modeling, and from all types of processing that are running in the factories and facilities. Almost 10 billion data points are generated on a daily basis. However, a large amount of data which is up to 74% could not be scaled up because firstly it requires the necessary infrastructure.
It is also important to ensure that you have the talent that knows how to scale it up and utilize all of that data and if the quality of data is not good, it would be difficult. For instance, seismic, which used to take months to run has been moved to two weeks, to days, and hours. In terms of running seismic, which took a long time earlier, now allows to discover more and find more oil and gas. In case of productivity of wells, they used to run logs but in areas where it cannot run all of these logs to see the subsurface in terms of permeability, porosity, however now AI can be used to predict machine learning in terms of predicting failures and all of it. Today, it can be predicted because there is a lot of data that comes in.
AI is helping in transforming the way all of this equipment is being managed and reducing downtime. It also helps in increasing efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint and this is transformative, for the industry. Furthermore, when it comes to using or managing it, for instance - stabilizing the grid, a lot is being invested in renewable in the kingdom, but at a certain point the grid should be managed because there is an intermittent production. Today, mechanical ways are used to manage the load.
With AI, it will be easier to manage the load and end up reducing the cost that is required mechanically today, to deliver the energy in a stable manner. Also, Reliability is an important factor for all. Furthermore, the industry spends almost $1 trillion and through this it would be possible to reduce carbon footprint as well. The energy industry is now looking at using the processed data, combine it with pressure, temperature, and predict much better in failures of these equipment.
Most of the employees are engineers who are trained in the field, and they are subject matter experts. The industry requires AI experts from Microsoft, Google, and other tech giants. However, the significance of the subject matter expert who understand AI, who will create the opportunities and this cannot be ignored since at the end of the day, it is important to see the size of the opportunity.
Another example is Corrosion. Corrosion not only impacts this industry, but it impacts every industry around the world. Let the industries use corrosion inhibitor, instrument-seeking, use coupons, and others the cost of it accounts to $3 trillion annually. Hence, this can be viewed as a huge opportunity. Another important use case is how do you create value by reducing corrosion? How do you use your process data, other than leveraging the corrosion inhibitor, and instrument-seeking? In terms of identifying where the corrosion is going to occur and how can it be reduced is an important factor. But at Aramco, large-language models are used to train the employees.
It uses about 70 billion parameters. The company is also developing a trillion-parameter large-language model which is important and critical for the company and its employees. The other factor for capitalizing on AI, and scaling it, is the need of the right infrastructure and this should be built keeping several factors and elements in mind as it is not just the fiber optics, the sensors, the computer capacity, and the language models but it is also the talents, and the people who understand all of these aforementioned factors.
Today, corrosion inhibitor, instrument-seeking, and ultra-thickness measurements are utilized to a greater extent. However, now, with AI, processed data can be used because with fluid, when a slug of water of water is sent it will create an impact on the pipe at a certain location. That data being processed simultaneously with the measurements that is taken leads to measuring corrosion precisely, identifying the location, predicting what will happen in these instruments and pipes because all of these do not exist today.
The AI expert cannot generate and observe the value as only the subject matter experts who are trained, who understand and understand the size of the opportunity and work with the specialist can really commercialize all of these technologies and this is what is Aramco is doing today.
We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Read more...
.jpg "Technology in Cancer Care: A story of evolving paradigms")
.jpg "Bringing Shop Floor to Manufacturer's palm: Smart Factory Solutions for tomorrow")
