November 13, 2024 [Oil Price]- The United Arab Emirates’ state-owned energy giant Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is breaking barriers in the global energy industry by integrating a highly autonomous form of Artificial Intelligence known as “Agentic AI” across the entire length of its value chain. The massive project is a joint undertaking, with ADNOC partnering with other international industry heavyweights G42, Microsoft and AIQ in the hopes of accessing the United States’ technologies to catalyze the Emirates’ own ambitious tech sector.
This innovative approach comes as part of an effort to diversify the United Arab Emirates’ economy and ease its heavy dependence on oil and other hydrocarbons. The government-backed G24 received a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft in April to do just that. “Emirati officials believe the Gulf state’s bet on artificial intelligence will strengthen its international clout by making it a key economic actor long after demand for oil has dried up,” Reuters reports.
As part of this initiative, the UAE is investing billions of its own dollars into developing and applying Artificial Intelligence. So far, this has funded projects including Arabic and Hindi language chatbot applications modeled off of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But the scale of Agentic AI will be leaps and bounds beyond those pilot projects.
Agentic AI allows computing systems to operate autonomously, independently carrying out tasks on behalf of humans to achieve set goals. “Unlike traditional AI models that simply respond to prompts or execute predefined tasks, agentic AI can make decisions, plan actions, and even learn from its experiences – all in pursuit of objectives set by its human creators,” a September Forbes article explained.
ADNOC is calling its adoption of the technology ENERGY^AI or ‘energy to the power of AI’. “It will not only analyse petabytes of data, but will proactively and autonomously identify operational improvements. It will perceive, think, learn and act, speed up seismic surveys from months to days and increase the accuracy of production forecasts by up to 90%. Ultimately, it will be a powerhouse for value creation, efficiency and sustainable energy production that can benefit the whole industry,” ADNOC CEO Sultan Al Jaber says.
Al Jaber, who is also the UAE’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and COP28 President, has issued a rallying cry to the wider energy industry to follow its lead to embrace machine learning technologies including and beyond Agentic AI.
Meeting the power needs of all that artificial intelligence may also inadvertently push for the diversification of the UAE’s energy mix. Al Jaber has said that its plans to massively expand AI will also provide a major incentive for oil companies to invest in renewables in order to keep up with rapidly rising energy needs. Indeed, ADNOC has made renewables a key part of its plan to ramp up AI expansion, as well as making AI a big part of its plan to ramp up renewables expansion.
At a global level, AI presents a major double-edged sword for the energy industry and the economy. While AI can be a major asset to managing evolving energy sector needs, the Department of Energy has warned that this approach could cause more harm than good if applied ‘naively.’ Meeting global climate goals will require intelligent, responsive, and flexible computing systems that can rapidly recognize, predict, and respond to complex production and consumption dynamics. Already, AI is integral to renewable energy forecasting, smart grids, coordination of energy demand and distribution, maximizing efficiency of power production, and research and development of new materials.
At the same time, the computational power necessary to sustain AI’s growth is doubling approximately every 100 days. At a global level, AI alone will be responsible for 3.5 percent of all energy consumption by 2030. “Fundamentally speaking, if you do want to save the planet with AI, you have to consider also the environmental footprint,” Sasha Luccioni, researcher of ethics at the open-source machine learning platform Hugging Face, told the Guardian last year. “It doesn’t make sense to burn a forest and then use AI to track deforestation.”
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