The News: An AI Center of Competence is being built by IBM Consulting for European oil and gas company Wintershall Dea to foster a holistic approach to using and scaling AI across diverse units inside businesses. The AI Center of Competency at Wintershall Dea aims to bring together the oil and gas company’s broad AI assets to better coordinate their use and benefits to the company and its customers. Read the full Press Release about the AI Center of Competency on the IBM Newsroom website.

IBM Is Building an AI Center of Competence With Wintershall Dea

Analyst Take: IBM Consulting and Wintershall Dea are wise to recognize the need and the value of building a fledgling AI Center of Competence that will help Wintershall Dea follow its path on its maturing AI journey. In my view, this is exactly the kind of forward thinking that is needed today as enterprises around the globe consider and dive into powerful AI tools and technologies for their own businesses.

By building an AI Center of Competence for Wintershall Dea, the oil and gas vendor will be able to better organize its AI strategies and directions by centralizing them and making them easier to reuse and grow with other units inside the company. This strategy, I believe, will add huge value to the AI capabilities of the entire company by allowing business units, developers, and a diverse range of employees across the operation to share what they find works, what does not work, and what is still needed when it comes to the use of AI technologies inside Wintershall Dea.

The Center of Competence approach, which is also known by names such as Centers of Excellence, can help organizations focus on expanding their expertise and experience in technologies or approaches that are important to their businesses but where they may not have enough hands-on experience to use them effectively. In my view, this is a strong starting point and it gives IT leaders credibility for acknowledging their organizational knowledge deficits and calling for the development of focused and targeted information and expertise gathering to improve organizations. I believe that initiatives like this one are what display sound leadership within organizations and I hope that more organizations and their leaders find value in this approach.

Centers of Competence can be used in fields including technology, healthcare, government, manufacturing, research, science, and more across an almost limitless range of business and group needs.

IBM has organized many such centers in the past within its organization, including a Center of Excellence for generative AI, an IBM Cyber Security Center of Excellence, and the IBM Project Management Center of Excellence.

Inside the AI Center of Competence for Wintershall Dea

At Wintershall Dea, AI projects have been part of the company’s mission for some time, which caused the business to begin to rethink how it was approaching AI. Inside the company, AI has been used for what they describe as small, easy-to-implement “fireflies,” which are quick, scalable AI projects aimed at solving simple problems, and for large-scale projects where AI implementations can bring major gains. I see this as a wise approach to fitting AI in where it can serve real-world business needs and bring in actionable and visible results for enterprises.

One Wintershall Dea firefly project was used to extract key values from more than 2,000 PDF documents, which were then automatically fed into a spreadsheet. Other “fireflies” have summarized reports using generative AI or searched for relevant information inside the company’s knowledge base to increase productivity across the company.

These are innovative examples, but I can clearly see how they might get isolated inside a company if there is not a central clearinghouse for these kinds of innovative use cases. And that is where this new AI Center of Competence will fill that gap, by being a central place for all kinds of AI project innovations inside Wintershall Dea to be compiled, discovered, and shared by other departments and employees to solve similar problems in their units.

For Wintershall Dea, every internal use of AI can now be gathered, catalogued, improved, shared, and cultivated for use across the company’s locations and facilities, helping the company and its workers to do their jobs better using the power of AI.

That, I believe, will be the central value of this new AI Center of Competence for the company, and I expect that it will also inspire new possibilities that no one has even imagined yet.

What IBM Is Bringing to the Wintershall Dea AI Center of Competence

For more than 4 years, IBM Consulting and Wintershall Dea have been working together on technology projects to streamline and improve the oil and gas company’s operations and processes. So, it is sensible that Wintershall Dea turned to IBM Consulting to deepen their relationship as the company moves to broaden its AI approaches across its facilities and employees.

The new AI Center of Competence is built upon a component-based architecture designed by the Wintershall Dea development team using state-of-the art services for data management, data visualization, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, and AI model development and execution on Azure. Bolstering this platform, IBM brought in an adapted version of its IBM AI at Scale methodology for Azure to further broaden the platform. All of this is done in collaboration with Microsoft for delivering data and AI projects based on Azure.

In addition, I believe that the work with IBM Consulting raises one of the most important attributes of any relationship between and company and its consultants – there must be trust and a solid track record of working well together when evaluating partners to take on projects that will have such huge importance and relevance across enterprise operations. In my research, these kinds of healthy relationships are must-haves in any successful professional partnership and they can make the difference between a successful or a failed project.

What This AI Center of Competence Means for Wintershall Dea

By creating this AI Center of Competence with IBM Consulting, I believe that Wintershall Dea is taking the perfect approach to the recent AI technology onslaught – it is embracing it, organizing its existing AI efforts, and providing the means for its employees adopt and use these powerful tools to further help the company and its customers.

That is what I appreciate most about this initiative – it can help every employee, from data scientists to citizen developers, from geoscientists to engineers, economists, and others – to gain the capabilities to drive data science projects within their respective teams across Wintershall Dea’s operations.

By delivering these possibilities to its workers, Wintershall Dea is embracing its latest AI tools and enabling growth, innovation, and change within its enterprise ecosystem.

That is a formula for success that I believe will be viewed favorably and replicated by many enterprise IT leaders as they continue to seek business advantages as they navigate their own AI journeys in the post-pandemic world.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.