Every two years, we bring together energy and technology leaders from across the globe to explore the latest development in digital for the energy sector.

As we turn the page on the SLB Digital Forum 2024, held this week in Monaco, we're left inspired by the tremendous progress our industry has made with digital to advance performance and sustainability. Yet, there is still more work to do to accelerate the impact of digital on both our current and future energy systems.

In his keynote address on Tuesday, our Chief Executive Officer Olivier Le Peuch emphasized this point, saying digital technologies need to move from proof-of-concept to full-scale deployment and be embedded into every aspect of our industry’s operations.

“The path ahead leads toward a higher-value, lower-carbon future, but it will require each of us,” Le Peuch said to attendees. “Together, through the power of digital, we can navigate new frontiers and turn promise into reality.”

Accelerating AI adoption at scale

Part of this new frontier is in artificial intelligence (AI). Today, our industry uses this powerful technology for a wide range of tasks, but there is so much more potential for AI to fundamentally transform the way our industry works.

"I believe AI will be the X factor for our industry, and we are closer to this reality than you may think," said Le Peuch.

By the end of this decade, we expect our industry to achieve a fully integrated, autonomous production life cycle—from subsurface planning to optimized field development and real-time operations. This will enable the optimization of assets in real time, marking a significant step forward in recovery while maximizing performance and sustainability.

Le Peuch stressed the importance of unleashing the full potential of AI industry-wide, saying it must evolve from a digital tool that supports individual tasks into a fundamental capability set, deeply embedded within every aspect of our planning and operations. During the event, we announced our AI-powered Lumi™ platform, which will enable our customers to do just that.

The open, secure and modular Lumi platform unlocks access to high-quality data across subsurface, surface, planning and operations―increasing cross-domain collaboration and releasing new intelligence and insights to improve the quality and speed of decision making at enterprise-level. The latest large language models (LLMs) as well as our industry-optimized domain foundation models will be embedded in the platform, enabling our customers to accelerate AI adoption at scale.

Fostering collaboration

Part of our digital philosophy from the beginning has been to foster an open, collaborative ecosystem where the entire industry can thrive. This was on full display during the event this week, with many of our customers and partners from the energy and tech sectors participating in joint technical and collaborative sessions.

As a digital leader for the sector, we believe our strategic partnerships and collaborations are key to developing performance-driven solutions for our customers. Since 2008, one of our key technology collaborators has been NVIDIA, a world-leader in accelerated computing for high-performance computing (HPC), visualization and AI.

During the event, we announced that we are building on our long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA to develop new generative AI solutions for energy. This collaboration will accelerate the development and deployment of industry-specific generative AI foundation models across SLB’s global platforms, including our Delfi™ digital platform and our new Lumi™ platform, by leveraging NVIDIA NeMo™, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, to develop custom generative AI that can be run in the data center, in any cloud or at the edge.

Working together with NVIDIA, we will build and optimize models to the specific needs and requirements of our data-intensive industry, including subsurface exploration, production operations and data management. This will help unlock the full potential of generative AI for energy domain experts including researchers, scientists and engineers.

Elevating sustainability

As we strive for higher-value, lower- carbon operations across the energy value chain, digital sustainability solutions have a key role to play in making this happen.

At the forum, we signed an agreement with Aramco to co-develop, commercialize and utilize digital solutions to help mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in industrial sectors. These solutions would be integrated within SLB’s digital sustainability platform, which will enable industrial companies to accelerate their progress toward net zero by more easily measuring, reporting and verifying (MRV) their emissions. This data and intelligence not only assists customers in ensuring compliance but also enables them to implement more strategic decarbonization actions, such as enhancing energy efficiency, reducing methane emissions, and advancing carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) initiatives.

The takeaway

For our industry, there is so much at stake: Global energy demand continues to rise, and there are higher expectations for energy security, affordability and sustainability.

“The time is now,” said Le Peuch. “This is our chance to reinvent ourselves and to innovate for the resilience of the industry.”