Collaboration moves the energy industry forward

This has been an incredible inaugural year for the Microsoft Energy & Resources Industry Leader Program (ILP). The overarching goal of the ILP is to bring together executive leaders from across the globe representing mining, oil and gas, and power and utilities industries to dive into technology topics that are top of mind. The engagement and enthusiasm this program is generating have been inspiring and energizing.

Over the past 12+ months, discussions have focused on significant digital technology innovations around the Industrial Metaverse, AI, Workforce Enablement, and Cybersecurity. It’s a privilege to be a part of these conversations and I look forward to more in 2024.

The Industrial Metaverse transforms simulation models

The world faces a trilemma of energy challenges encompassing security, equity and access, and sustainability. Digital technology is key to helping the energy industry address these challenges holistically and efficiently.

A more intuitive, visual way of working with contextualized information that empowers both front-line and knowledge workers can be game-changing. The energy industry has been leveraging simulation models—digital twins—for decades for plant design, what-if scenarios, troubleshooting, and optimizing operations. What’s new and exciting now is that the cloud allows us to add data analytics, AI, and augmented reality to create dynamic models based on data from across the entire enterprise. Organizations can build digital replicas of any asset—power plants, distribution grids, production operations—and combine them with real-time data to drive more insights, at a scale and pace to better meet safety, productivity, and sustainability goals. Discover how Microsoft is innovating in the metaverse for a sustainable, clean energy future.

AI and copilots drive exciting opportunities

It’s been gratifying to witness customer excitement around Azure OpenAI and digital assistants such as Microsoft Copilot—generating a lot of buzz in recent months—that can be deployed to improve productivity and business-specific processes. For example, we are helping energy companies explore how they can use generative AI to advance baseline use cases like predictive maintenance and operations improvement.?

Judson Althoff recently shared the broad impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot across lines of business tied to CRM and ERP systems. These core enterprise systems are mission-critical but rely on laborious tasks like manual data entry, content generation, and notetaking. Copilot automates these tasks across business functions, freeing the workforce to focus on high-value, creative, and strategic activities.

At the November 2023 Microsoft Ignite, we also announced exciting capabilities by combining the power of generative AI and mixed reality in Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides. Workers can use speech and gestures to interact with complex equipment and processes, improving employee safety and productivity, and operational efficiency and effectiveness across the energy industry.? ?

Going forward, we want to help customers and partners build their own copilots with Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot Studio to realize opportunities specific to their organizations and business goals. If you’d like to learn more about some of the AI solutions powering the energy and resources industry, check out The era of AI: Transformative AI solutions powering the energy and resources industry.

Digital technologies empower the workforce

The energy industry faces substantial challenges as the world transitions to cleaner energy and new technologies. The resulting accelerated digitization requires workers to gain new skills and incorporate new technologies into their workflow—which takes time and effort. Additionally, a large percentage of the workforce is nearing retirement, and worker shortages are becoming a major concern.

According to a Harvard Business Review Study, organizations that empower their frontline workers have seen benefits of 72% increased productivity and a 69% increase in both customer and employee engagement and satisfaction. As many studies have shown, employee engagement is critical to the bottom line and companies with more engaged employees also have better financial outcomes.

AI-powered technologies are helping companies upskill existing workers, boost employee retention, and train recruits with easy-to-use tools that facilitate tasks and decision-making via automated processes. Tools like Power BI and Microsoft Copilot provide easy access to interactive data visualizations, live reports, and dashboards so workers—be it a call center employee, a maintenance worker, an engineer or an executive—are equipped to make more informed decisions. When everyone has access to holistic data and AI tools, everyone is empowered.

Team collaboration tools, intelligent mixed-reality devices, IoT-enabled assets, and AI-enhanced applications help employees keep pace with increased operational, maintenance, and process complexity. For example, digital technologies connect technicians to distributed assets so they can troubleshoot and resolve issues remotely instead of sending a technician out to every call. If a technician is needed, the ones with knowledge specific to the issues can be dispatched and local workers can collaborate with central experts aided by remote assistance applications.

Leigh-Ann Russell, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at bp, discusses the digital transformation journey at bp and how Copilot for Microsoft 365 is enhancing productivity, business performance, and innovation capabilities across their entire global workforce.

AI technologies change everything

With AI becoming more easily and thoughtfully embedded in everything we do, our skills and capabilities can increase by leaps and bounds. For me, some of the most important benefits of AI and Copilot are the ability to free up time for innovation, collaboration, and the creativity required to tackle the global energy trilemma.

The extent of digital and AI innovations over the last year are extraordinary. I’ll share a few below, and you can find a more extensive look at the depth and breadth of opportunities here. ?

• Microsoft Power Apps enable every team to build low-code applications specific to their business needs—and do so quickly and compliantly within each company’s IT structure and governance.
• Besides automating tasks, Copilot for Microsoft 365 summarizes documents, meetings, and even emails. It's invaluable for researching information and drafting new content—documents, presentations, emails—freeing up time for more creativity and innovation.
• Companies are leveraging our cloud-to-edge technology to democratize access and combine data from information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), and engineering technology (ET) systems—with solutions like Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides—to drive better decision-making and improve operational safety, reliability, and efficiency.

Innovation and collaboration are essential for creating the impactful and scalable decarbonization and sustainable energy solutions needed for the world to achieve net zero emissions. The pioneering collaboration between Innovation Force, Paradox Strategies, and Dr. Linda Hill resulted in an AI-enabled InnovationWorks platform that empowers, scales, and democratizes innovation in the energy industry—based on three decades of data from more than 100 organizations to create AI capable of measuring and predicting successful innovation from cultural factors. The recent launch of InnovationWorks Hangar further enables ecosystem collaboration on groundbreaking ideas. It's exciting to see more than 100 active innovators from over 50 different energy companies working on 500 "Test Flights" or use cases in the first month.

The power of AI technologies is coupled with the need for safe and inclusive experiences deployed on comprehensive and protected data.?We are committed to the advancement of AI driven by ethical principles and ensuring AI systems are developed responsibly and in ways that maintain trust. Our AI solutions and technology development align with Microsoft’s AI Principles of fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.

Cybersecurity is imperative for critical energy infrastructure

Cyberattacks are on the rise and critical infrastructure is a frequent target. The US Energy Department reported attacks on US Power Grids increased 77% in 2022 from the prior year. The Microsoft Digital Defense 2022 report also revealed that nation state attacks targeting critical national infrastructure had doubled from 20% to 40%. ?

The complexity and decentralized nature of energy networks provide more surface area for attack and we have seen geopolitical conflicts exacerbate nation state attacks. As energy and resources companies rapidly digitize, add IoT assets, and adopt new technologies, they must also ensure that operations are secure. Digital transformation and cybersecurity go hand-in-hand in Microsoft’s comprehensive security solutions—from edge to cloud—including Microsoft Defender for IoT for industrial infrastructure, such as industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT), Security Copilot, and Secure Future Initiative to advance security engineering.

AI has tremendous potential to take security system hardening to a new level. Microsoft Security Copilot brings AI security capabilities at machine speed to the enterprise. Time is critical. In just two years, the number of password attacks detected by Microsoft has risen from 579 per second to more than 4,000 per second. It’s reassuring to see energy companies deploy AI and the Security Copilot to gain an edge in the fight against more frequent and sophisticated cyberattacks.

Collaboration is key to a more secure, reliable, equitable, and sustainable future for all

Getting together with IT and business-line leaders across the energy industry to collaborate on key challenges and innovations has been a highlight of the past year. Such conversations are helping the entire industry grow and advance toward our collective goals. A big thank you to all of our participants and I look forward to expanding our discussions in the coming year.?

You can learn more about digital innovation and solutions for the energy and resources industry on our Microsoft for Energy & Resources website and by following the Energy & Resources blog. Also, follow me on LinkedIn, and check out The Short Circuit with Darryl Willis video and podcast series featuring discussions with industry experts and thought leaders sharing their insights and perspectives on the current state and future of the energy sector.