Thomas Siebel, author, chairman and CEO at C3.ai, spoke at a GastechTech Talk on the digital transformation of the oil and gas industry and the importance of digital technologies in surviving the impact of COVID-19
Siebel began by saying we are undergoing a ‘mass extinction event’, with 52% of Fortune 500 companies having disappeared in the last 21 years, and predictions that 40% of the companies on the planet today will not survive the next decade. New companies with ‘new DNA’, such as Amazon, Uber, Tesla and Google are filling the vacuums that are created by this ‘mass extinction event’.
"When we think about what these companies are all about, when we get to this issue of corporate mass extinction and digital transformation, predictions are that 70% of the existing companies today will go digital and 21% will succeed. The rest will go out of business,” he said. “This digital transformation process has clearly been accelerated in the post-COVID economy.”
Digital transformation has now come to the top of the agenda for the CEO and board directors.
“What are the vectors driving the information technology industry in the 21st century? These would include elastic cloud computing, like AWS, and Azure, and Google Cloud. The concept of big data means we’re able today to store and manipulate data sets that were previously unmanageable.
This phenomenon of the Internet of Things – we are sensoring the value chains, travel, transportation, oil and gas, healthcare utilities, the power grid, so that all the devices in the value chain are becoming remotely machine addressable.....today we’ve probably sensored in an order of 50 billion devices around the world. Across all value chains, this is accelerating. The confluence of technology trends such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things is enabling previously unsolvable problems to be solved using artificial intelligence.”
Read more on our latest issue of Oil Review Middle East.
