AWS Energy Symposium 2024

This past week, it was again my pleasure and privilege to attend the AWS Energy Symposium 2024 at the George R. Brown Convention Center here in Houston. As usual, AWS runs a first-class event which was very well attended ... I'm guessing 400+ attendees, though probably 2/3 AWS and vendor/partners and only 1/3 customers. It was a day-and-a-half event, though I only joined on Day 2, where the bulk of the content was presented. Obviously, I was not able to attend all the sessions or any of the workshops.

Day 2’s morning sessions were filled with insightful presentations and panel sessions including participants from Enverus, GE Vernova, BP, Oxy, 1PointFive, PwC, SAP National Security Services, NextEra Energy, and of course, AWS. The key theme of the symposium was all around Generative AI, and in particular its uses in the back office and front office for Q&A analysis, content management, and code generation for application development or repurposing. I was also impressed with the number of women presenters occupying leadership positions in many firms.

Since I am an industrial operations and operational technology (OT) guy, I was hoping to see an emphasis on AI/ML and Agents in manufacturing and the process industries. As I noted, this wasn’t a main focus of the symposium, but we did get a taste of this with:

·????The live semi-autonomous robot inspection demo

·????The GenAI assistant that leveraged the domain knowledge and data set from Enverus

·?????NOVs Dr. Ali Marzban’s use of ML to detect a well kick up to 45 minutes in advance

·???? Seeq’s Mark Pietryka on advanced analytics in the process industries

It’s also worth noting that Slalom was the only company talking about the use of Agents for improving productivity and efficiency in the back office and other applications. Slalom – more power to you as this is where AI/ML is headed.

I wrapped up the afternoon by attending four Breakout Sessions starting with ExxonMobil’s Michael Hotaling talking about Digital Reality Ecosystems and how they have sped up the design and construction phases of capital projects; TC Energy and NextEra use of GenAI for content and contract management; and then finally a panel session on Generative AI & Energy — A New Era of Possibilities which featured ExxonMobil’s Dr. Xiaojun Huang, Halliburton’s Dr. Julianna Toms, and AWS’s Scott Rosecrans. Both Huang and Toms gave high-level use case examples. I was particularly interested in how far ExxonMobil had taken AI/ML in their manufacturing operations, but Dr. Huang did not get into specifics. C’mon ExxonMobil … enquiring minds want to know … if you’ve found the secret sauce, please share it??!

The event was bolstered by AWS’s Bedrock platform for building and scaling Generative AI applications with foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build Generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI. To go along with Bedrock, AWS offers the tools for building Agents too. You can learn more at: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/ai-agents/ More from me on Agentic AI in future blogs.

Now a question is how far will AWS go with Bedrock and Agents? The opportunities in the back and front offices are huge and game-changing regarding productivity and impact, and we are only getting started. And there is no shortage of competition, even from partners like Databricks. Industrial companies are moving ahead with their own analytics solutions, that may run on AWS but don’t use AWS’s AI/ML components … witness NOV’s use of Databricks. But moving into manufacturing requires domain knowledge and thus partners, as the Enverus-based assistant demonstrated. Thus, we shall see where AWS goes with this.

All in all, it was a very successful conference. And especially a chance for me to network and meet up with old and valued colleagues: Rich Tisch of AWS; Cheo Alvarez and Sebastiano Barbarino of OVS, now Baker Hughes; Olivier Germain of Halliburton; and Larry Williams of IBM.

My only beef is that the event organizer should have put more water in the ballroom and in every breakout session room. Beyond that, many thanks again to AWS and the many sponsors for hosting another successful conference.