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BP engineers 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 company.
The energy giant will use AI 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 over 2 million sensors into a single operating picture.
Sunjay Pandey, senior vice-president for digital delivery at BP, said the deal with Palantir reflected “the ongoing digital transformation of BP’s operations”, which would enhance operational performance. The value of the contract has not been disclosed.
Palantir, co-founded in 2002 by Peter Thiel, 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. The 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.
The company’s shares have risen 83 per cent since the start of the year as it benefits from a jump in sales driven by artificial intelligence. 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 later 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”.
The shares were up $2.19, or 7.2 per cent, at $32.52, in pre-market trading in New York on Monday.
In a note on Sunday, 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.”