The deployment of generative AI across the operations of energy companies is gathering pace. The latest to say it is embracing the technology more widely is Madrid-based Repsol, which has just announced it will broaden its use of AI agents in collaboration with Accenture.
AI agents are generally defined as autonomous intelligent systems performing specific tasks – often mundane or time consuming-ones – without human intervention. Repsol says it will work with Accenture to build, customise and deploy the technology, using components of the Accenture AI Refinery platform and the NVIDIA AI platform.
Josu Jon Imaz, Repsol’s CEO, said that Accenture had been providing the diversified energy company with tools to improve efficiency and competitiveness since it launched its Digital Program over six years ago.
“We aspire to be one of the pioneering companies in the energy sector in the use of these technologies,” he said.
The results of the extended partnership should be greater efficiency of processes and improved productivity across all the company’s businesses as they are scaled up. On the customer side, these technologies are designed to improve their experience, delivering more tailored offerings with greater accuracy and speed.
Repsol said this latest wave of AI deployment represents an evolution of its Digital Program, which has been informed by work over recent years at its Generative AI Competence Centre. According to the firm, this has laid the foundations for analysing and understanding the advantages of gen AI and defined a strategy to extend it throughout the organization.
Under the Digital Program, a team of specialists has supported more than 650 digital initiatives across Repsol’s businesses. More than 1,200 people work directly on these projects, in collaboration with 50 technology partners.
According to Repsol, the AI agents will help reinvent and streamline processes into more dynamic and less complex workflows to boost productivity, enabling Repsol employees to work in a faster, more efficient and simpler way. Areas to be covered range from planning and forecasting to application maintenance and incident resolution.
The partners are also set to explore the use of AI agents and NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform for use in digital twins and robotic solutions, which will help staff perform maintenance and other activities in Repsol’s industrial and logistics centres more efficiently.
In addition, Accenture will work with Repsol to create training and adoption programmes for the workforce, to facilitate their use of these new technologies.
Digital partnerships
Such collaborations are part of a wider trend of both large and smaller-scale partnerships across the energy sector, where the race is on to gain the edge of competitors by leveraging the power of AI and other digital solutions to automate and simplify tasks.
A recent example is the January 2025 announcement of a new agreement for digital twin software developer Aize – part of Norway’s Aker group – to work with bp on asset visualization in its operations. The agreement builds on work already done in the North Sea, Caspian Sea, and West Africa, and will involve an expansion of the software across new regions and bp facilities globally, according to Aize.
The UK-based energy giant also signed a major agreement with data analytics firm Palantir Technologies in September 2024, to introduce new AI capabilities to bp’s operations using Palantir’s software.The energy sector is gradually becoming more confident about adopting AI – and gen AI specifically – across different operational areas. That represents a marked shift in usage which, as consultancy DNV reported in its latest Energy Transition outlook, has thus far tended to be restricted in the energy sector to low-risk applications, such as productivity-enhancing tools for staff like MS copilot and experimental work.
(Photo: Repsol)
