Silicon Valley to Big Oil: We Can Manage Your Data Better Than You

HOUSTON--A Google executive wearing white jeans and a navy T-shirt stood before a roomful of suit-clad oil executives here last month and delivered a blunt sales pitch: We can manage your data better than you. Darryl Willis, part of a new group Google has created to court the oil and gas industry, said energy companies have reams of data but only use 5% of it, a serious problem in the digital economy. Signing a cloud deal with Google, part of Alphabet Inc., GOOGL 3.89% could solve that, he argued. "Companies in the oil and gas industry will either be a catalyst for change or they will be a casualty of change," he said during a presentation at the Unify Conference, an industry forum on digital technology put on by Baker Hughes, a part of General Electric Co. Silicon Valley has come to Houston, as tech companies push to sign oil and gas companies to lucrative cloud and artificial intelligence deals. In recent months, companies including Chevron Corp. CVX 2.08%, Equinor AS EQNR 1.00% A, Total SA TOT 1.14% and Repsol SA REP -0.06% have entered into contracts with companies such as Google and Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.29% collectively worth billions of dollars.