Philippe Herve, vice president of oil and gas solutions for Austin-based SparkCognition, works with major energy producers including BP to improve efficiency in the oil patch.
He spent more than 30 years at Schlumberger and other companies before joining SparkCognition two years ago. The 4-year-old firm, which employs about 250 people, develops artificial intelligence solutions for producers looking to use operations data to detect and prevent failures and cut costs, among other things.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What sets SparkCognition apart from other AI firms?
What we’ve been able to develop over the years is a technology that is completely transforming artificial intelligence. We have found a way to simplify the work of the data scientist. Data scientists today are in heavy demand. They’re often hired to find what’s called the model, the algorithm that will present your data. Finding those models is very complicated, but we have been able to write a piece of software that does that. Instead of taking months of work by data scientists, it now takes maybe two hours of processing time to find those models. We find the model extremely quickly, and they’re orders of magnitude better than those that humans can develop.