Janet White - IBM

You recently gave the keynote presentation at the panel discussion this morning, could you tell us a little bit more about that?

The oil and gas industry is going through a significant transformation and it’s responding to be more responsive to customers, to be more efficient, more sustainable and attract more new talents. My keynote is about a holistically transformed organisation called the Cognitive Enterprise. Imagine an organisation which can understand reason, learn and interact. This Cognitive Enterprise is built on exponential technologies like the ones that we’ve been talking about and, will be talking about in this conference, AI, blockchain, analytics, IOT 5g. This Cognitive Enterprise is infused with workflows that contain AI at its core but the most important thing is that it needs to be built on an organisation with a new culture of innovation and new talents. So, the great news is that there are lots of oil and gas companies in upstream that are already starting on this major journey of transformation.

Can you tell us what IBM are working on at the moment?

That’s a big question, so I’m going to focus on three things. The first is that we are a technology company, so we’re working with oil and gas companies on very futuristic technologies such as quantum but we’re also clearly providing now technologies that are exponential which we are talking about again in this conference: AI, blockchain, analytics and multi-cloud. The second thing that our services organisation is focused on when working with oil and gas companies is helping them to accelerate their return on investment in their transformation programmes. We have industry specialists in oil and gas who can come in and work with the technologies that we provide, though there are other technology companies that provide and help them implement and embed these transformations. Finally, we’re an organisation very focused on diversity and inclusion and working with our clients and ourselves to develop new talents with the new technologies that are coming on stream.