Opinion: The Future is Exponential, The Future is Digital

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“The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.”—Douglas Engelbart

Over the past 60 years, a couple of trends and specific events contributed to drastically changing the way we live and work today. The reasons why we even entertain a conversation about digital transformation takes its roots from these few trends and events.

The future is exponential

In the 1980s, society had the first laptops. In the 1990s, the internet was becoming global and gaining in popularity. In the 2000s, high-speed internet was introduced and humanity was moving data at the speed of light for the first time ever (we think). In the 2010s, cloud computing, infrastructure as a service and software as a service were becoming a standard, with storage virtually limitless.

Memory storage has become extremely cheap, and storage devices are getting increasingly smaller in size and bigger in capacity. Computing power available on an average laptop is increasingly getting bigger, and quantum computing is just around the corner.

The increasing speed at which these consecutive transformations have taken place have forced our culture to adapt. Everything is needed now, sometimes yesterday, because tomorrow is going to be too late.

The foreign exchange and stock exchange markets and leaders of the world economies are fully relying on artificial intelligence (AI) for trading. This is driving business transformations and change in organizations—adapting to market change and increasingly predicting change to know how to proactively adapt.

The future is digital

The future of oil and gas producers and service companies will depend on how fast they adapt to the constantly evolving energy landscape. Recent years have demonstrated how difficult it is for non-digitalized companies to cope with the ever-changing market conditions and how increasingly difficult it has become for the oil and gas industry to recover from each successive economic crisis.

The industry is far behind in digitalization. Only 5% of data generates value, 3% of equipment is connected and 1% of data supports decision-making. Clearly, the industry has a long way to go in leveraging this new digital reality.

This is why it is now vital for us as an industry to embrace digitalization as a positive disruption to traditional data processing workflows, understand the opportunity and potential behind AI and its many applications, and ensure we are transforming our industry to become smarter, leaner and, most importantly, sustainable.

Doing so will take a lot of adapting and adopting new digitally enabled ways of working. Oil and gas companies will need to revamp their data ecosystem, data architecture and create data platforms fit for AI processing. They will equally need to develop internal talent to ensure their resilience and long-term sustainable transformation. It will also require program management discipline, change management culture, both short- and long-term projects, and a very good understanding by the decision makers of the risks of ignoring the digital disruption.

Furthermore, decision makers need to action these steps fast because the world is changing around us faster than ever.

This decade is the decade of ever more change. We are going through the COVID-19 pandemic imposed changes. The acceleration in adopting digital tools to accommodate remote ways of working is phenomenal and only illustrates the point that organizations that are digital, fit and lean will make it through the crisis and emerge even stronger.

TGT aims to pioneer and lead the advancement of predictive diagnostics in the energy sector, positively impacting long-term sustainability and ESG initiatives. TGT is developing multiple AI-enabled products that will fulfill the growing sector demand for predictive analytics and diagnostics.

“Societies are driven by technology but defined by humanity.”—Gert Leonhard