Artificial Intelligence for Oil and Gas: Is it time to invest?

When I first heard of predictive analytics, machine learning, and cognitive security, I was skeptical. I am an engineer at heart and condition-based maintenance was the only way, I thought, to effectively look at predictive maintenance. You start with the physical asset, you deploy sensors to monitor critical components, and you analyze the data. The thing is, this approach is expensive and time-consuming. Sensors need to be deployed and installed on existing equipment, software to collect, store, and process the data needs to be integrated, O&M teams need to be trained on the technology, and the software needs to be constantly updated.