Catastrophe brings a search for accountability. As fires wreak havoc in California, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., claimed in a post on X the catastrophe is "what a climate emergency looks like." He took aim at President-elect Trump, asserting the incoming president has been bought off by the oil industry. "Trump has been bought for 1 billion by Big Oil. Just a payoff to kill the IRA and the Green New Deal. We know what will happen. The LA fires are preview of coming atrocities," Markey declared in a post on X. Markey, who claims there is a "climate crisis," has also warned about the potential effects of artificial intelligence (AI).

Enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging industry. Offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) is now incredibly common among technology companies, but C3.ai (NYSE:AI) has blazed a new trail by providing its customers with foundational AI tools on a subscription basis. With 4.8 million artificial intelligence models delivering 1.5 billion predictions per day, it's the biggest player in what is still a small game. However, its impressive customer list suggests the company is punching well above its weight. C3.ai serves dozens of industries, but oil and gas is one of the most notable -- and a collaborative effort with Baker Hughes (NYSE:BKR) might be a looking glass into what this company is really capable of. In a world where many investors are shunning industries known to cause social or environmental harm, it's not surprising that oil and gas companies have fallen out of favor.

With the help of artificial intelligence, BP says it needs 40% fewer workers to keep its natural gas ... [ ] flowing in Wyoming. A visitor to one of BP's natural gas fields in Wyoming a few years ago might have noticed an odd sight: smartphones in plastic bags tied to pumps with zip ties. This was an early test of a multistate initiative by the oil giant to link a network of Wi-Fi sensors to an artificial intelligence system--one that now operates the Wamsutter field in Wyoming with far less human oversight than before. Artificial intelligence has come to the oil patch, accelerating a technical change that is transforming the conditions for the oil and gas industry's 150,000 U.S. workers. Giant energy companies like Shell and BP are investing billions to bring artificial intelligence to new refineries, oilfields and deepwater drilling platforms.

Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google into promising to slash their carbon emissions. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were accelerating the oil companies' greenhouse gas emissions. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms, in many cases supplying them not just with remote data storage but also artificial intelligence tools for pinpointing better drilling spots or speeding up refinery production. The oil and gas industry is spending roughly $20 billion each year on cloud services, which accounts for about 10% of the total cloud market, according to Vivek Chidambaram, a managing director of Accenture's energy consultancy.

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND – Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google to make promises to slash their carbon emissions. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were accelerating the oil companies' greenhouse gas emissions. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms, in many cases supplying them not just with remote data storage but also artificial intelligence tools for pinpointing better drilling spots or speeding up refinery production. The oil and gas industry is spending roughly $20 billion each year on cloud services, which accounts for about 10 percent of the total cloud market, according to Vivek Chidambaram, a managing director of Accenture's energy consultancy.

Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google promising to slash their carbon emissions. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were accelerating the oil companies' greenhouse gas emissions. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms, in many cases supplying them not just with remote data storage but also artificial intelligence tools for pinpointing better drilling spots or speeding up refinery production. The oil and gas industry is spending roughly $20 billion each year on cloud services, which accounts for about 10% of the total cloud market, according to Vivek Chidambaram, a managing director of Accenture's energy consultancy.

In this May 6, 2019 file photo, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers the keynote address at Build, the company's annual conference for software developers in Seattle. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms. One employee stood up to ask Microsoft CEO Nadella about the ethics of the company's oil and gas contracts at an all-staff meeting in Sept. 2019, and Nadella defended the partnerships. Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google promising to slash their carbon emissions. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named.

The oil price crash of 2014 and the global'digitalization and disruption' drive coincided in a rather bizarre way to push the oil industry to seek cost cuts through innovation and new technologies. Big Tech was only too pleased to help Big Oil, seeing a new revenue stream in an industry long thought to be of the'dinosaur' type that was too slow to embrace new ways of doing things. Many oil and gas firms, especially the world's biggest, are already using data analytics, cloud computing, digital oil fields, digital twins, robotics, automation, predictive maintenance, machine learning, and even AI. The technology giants have seized the opportunity to sell such services to Big Oil, and top managers at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and ABB Group, to name a few, flocked to this week's top energy industry event CERAWeek by IHS Markit in Houston to pitch their solutions to a wider audience. "A great wave of innovation and technology is transforming the industry and reshaping the energy future," said Daniel Yergin, conference chair and vice chairman of IHS Markit.

With the help of artificial intelligence, BP says it needs 40% fewer workers to keep its natural gas flowing in Wyoming. A visitor to one of BP's natural gas fields in Wyoming a few years ago might have noticed an odd sight: smartphones in plastic bags tied to pumps with zip ties. This was an early test of a multistate initiative by the oil giant to link a network of Wi-Fi sensors to an artificial intelligence system--one that now operates the Wamsutter field in Wyoming with far less human oversight than before. Artificial intelligence has come to the oil patch, accelerating a technical change that is transforming the conditions for the oil and gas industry's 150,000 U.S. workers. Giant energy companies like Shell and BP are investing billions to bring artificial intelligence to new refineries, oilfields and deepwater drilling platforms.

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.