“Each of our retail locations has maybe six cameras and captures something in the region of 200 megabytes per second of data. If you try to load all that into the cloud, that quickly becomes vastly unmanageable at scale,” said Daniel Jeavons, Shell’s general manager for data science. “The intelligent edge allows us to be selective about the data we pass up to the cloud.”

Azure Databricks also allows Shell’s data scientists to use popular open-source technologies that, on their own, can be labor intensive and require a lot of support. The Databricks installation is stable and easy to use, and allows for more seamless collaboration, Jeavons said.

Shell sees vast potential for intelligent computer vision tools to automatically detect behaviors or conditions in video camera footage and alert the company to potential safety risks. It could be deployed on construction projects to flag when employees aren’t wearing proper safety equipment or to inspect equipment sitting on the seafloor thousands of feet underwater.

“Historically, we’ve had robotics with cameras that we could send down there, but we’d have to manually look through that video footage to determine if there’s a reason to intervene,” Sebregts said. “With video analytics we can completely automate that. It’s faster, cheaper, better and safer — the use cases and opportunities are endless.”

Product experts teach machines complex tasks

Shell also is collaborating with Microsoft engineers on a project that uses AI and machine learning to improve how it drills horizontal wells. The oil and gas industry has realized significant cost efficiencies, reduced its footprint and reached new oil and gas resources onshore by substituting traditional methods of drilling wells straight down for long-reach, horizontal drilling.

“Geosteering” is the challenge of pinpointing the long, horizontal well position exactly and steering it to reach the most productive rock containing oil and gas. While Shell’s remote drilling technologies have advanced geosteering, it remains complex and labor intensive, requiring 24/7 decision-making from highly skilled professionals.

Shell developed Shell Geodesic™ in house with their own AI research scientists. It’s an AI solution to improve the accuracy and consistency of a horizontal well’s directional control to reach optimal oil and gas reservoirs. Shell Geodesic™ features a drilling simulator, which offers a user-friendly interface, and a suite of machine learning and control algorithms that gives geologists and drillers a better view of the best layers of oil and gas rock.

YouTube Video Click here to load media

In one part of the solution, they applied a machine teaching framework developed by Bonsai, which was acquired by Microsoft last summer, that allows subject matter experts with little background in data science or AI to tell the system what it wants the intelligent agent to do and what key information it needs to know to do that job successfully.

This Microsoft team works on combining this subject matter expertise with deep reinforcement learning — a branch of AI that enables models to learn from experiences much like a person does, rather than from meticulously labeled data.

The Bonsai platform performs much of the machine learning mechanics in the background — translating instructions into algorithms, creating neural networks and teaching the model the desired behavior. Using this approach, it produced an intelligent agent that, in a proof-of-concept test, learned how to optimally steer the drill using a simplified simulated 2D virtual well environment.

“What excites us about Bonsai is that it gives us a reinforcement learning platform that allows us to scale quickly and takes away the engineering effort involved in stitching together the open-source capabilities so our data scientists can focus on what they’re best at, which is figuring out what the model needs to do,” Jeavons said. “It’s early days still, but we’re extremely excited about the potential.”

Improving employee engagement

But Shell’s digital transformation isn’t just limited to its physical wells, pipelines and plants. It’s also changing the way employees working around the globe communicate with each other.

When Shell’s internal communications team started looking for ways to boost employee engagement and empower everyone across the organization to share information, they settled on a combination of intelligent tools offered as part of Microsoft Office365: Yammer, Stream and SharePoint Online.

Leaders started using Stream, an enterprise video service, to connect with employees more authentically and personally. Now, in addition to leadership communications, employees can easily find or create videos to promote safety, share best practices or analyze a successful project. Stream features like automatic closed captioning and deep search ensure communications are accessible and help employees quickly find the most useful content.

Those videos can be easily posted on SharePoint, a collaboration repository, and Yammer, a corporate social network that allows employees to have conversations with peers across the organization and give leaders insights into what employees are experiencing. More than three-quarters of Shell employees now use Yammer, with an average of 4,000 joining each month. The discussions help unify teams that are dispersed across the globe, solve problems together and foster open communication between groups that had little contact before.

For instance, employees working the night shift on a rig off the cost of Australia might use Yammer to alert the incoming crew to any issues they’ve experienced, and they can now ask if someone working at another location around the world might have a solution.

“These tools allow people to connect with each other, to learn from each other, to see opportunities quicker and build off of each other’s skills,” Sebregts said. “I lead a global organization, and in the past someone doing my type of job might travel around the world and hold a traditional town hall everywhere and once a quarter they would send an email with some thoughts. This is a new era of communication — it’s open, instantaneous, it’s modern, it’s fast, and I love it.”

Related:

Jennifer Langston writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow her on Twitter.