AI and DIY: How Shell is democratizing innovation across industries

At Microsoft, we are proud of our role in helping partners around the world build a sustainable future. Making a successful energy transition depends on collective effort and an ecosystem supported by investment and input across industries.

Last year, as part of our progress toward these goals, we announced a strategic alliance with Shell, a company with decades of expertise in innovating and delivering energy solutions. This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Huibert Vigeveno, Downstream Director at Shell, for an update on that alliance.

Shell provides a range of low-carbon energy products and services, including renewable energy, offsets for carbon emissions, and immersion cooling fluids for Microsoft’s datacenters. We talked a lot about the technology aspects of our alliance, and it is so impressive to see how Shell is putting AI to work across inventory management, safety, supply, production, and more.

Building a platform for sustainability  

Over the last few months, Shell’s teams have been collaborating on a digital platform that allows companies to track their sustainability initiatives. This platform provides a very detailed and accurate sense of different business requirements and what an organization needs to do to reduce its emissions. Companies in a range of industries can use the technology to get a picture of baseline measurements, set goals, and develop plans to achieve them.

The platform is built on Microsoft technologies, and more than 50 companies—including Microsoft—are piloting the program.

Embedding AI across Shell’s organization and assets

Shell also is using AI across its business units. Shell.ai, the company’s data and analytics platform, provides machine learning and software engineering capabilities and is part of Shell’s plan to embed AI throughout the organization.

Last year, Shell developed and deployed 65 AI applications to address various priority objectives, including the next generation of the Shell Inventory Optimizer, an undertaking between Shell and Equinor with support from Microsoft. This AI application helps improve inventory planning for spare parts. It has been used across Shell’s assets and has generated more than $25 million in cost savings through reduced waste, achieved by keeping just the right amount of stock on hand.

A DIY program for citizen developers

Culture is the driving force that underpins much of this shift in thinking about AI, with the realization that innovation can happen at all levels of a company. Shell is encouraging its teams to understand, develop, and use technologies that can create efficiency anywhere in the business.

One way they are achieving this is through a do-it-yourself program to empower citizen data scientists and developers already writing their own code. Shell is now training them to develop solutions for very specific processes and workflows using tools such as Microsoft PowerApps and Power BI. In the process, it is democratizing its own digital transformation.

In the past year alone, Shell’s manufacturing business has trained more than 800 DIY developers. The business now has 75 DIY applications, which have generated more than $35 million in cost savings through improved reliability and efficiency—and there are at least 200 more in the pipeline.

Through our partnership with Shell, Microsoft is making progress on our sustainability goals and empowering teams inside Shell and companies around the world to innovate more quickly and efficiently, in ways that generate better outcomes for the environment and the planet. 

We are grateful for that partnership here at Microsoft and the progress that we are making together. I feel like it is the true mark of what this kind of alliance and partnership can accomplish.