Arria NLG PLC (LON:NLG) Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Gould and INOVX Solutions Inc Chief Executive Officer John Bell caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their new partnership agreement
Q1: Now Matthew, congratulations on Arria NLG’s new partnership agreement with INOVX Solutions. Can you tell me about more about how you’ll be working together?
A1: Yes, well it’s sort of natural partnership born out of the complimentary nature of the two technologies. So John’s company has such a strong pedigree in the understanding and managing and monitoring of these critical field assets in the oil and gas world, Arria obviously evolved out of applications for expert analysis in that same vertical, in oil and gas. So it’s a really good partnership in terms of our base technologies and the provenance of the two companies and we’ll be working very closely with John’s development team led by our CTO, Dr Robert Dale, to put that narrative layer into their virtual 3D models of the various assets that they design for. So I’ll let John speak for his side of the business but we’re very excited to be putting that expert narrative into their system, it’s a sort of project, a sort of case study, that we’ve been eager to have in oil and gas for some time.
Q2: John, how many users are currently using INOVX Solutions and how many do you think will benefit from working together?
A2: So INOVX has nearly 20% market share of the 3D operational market so we’re very much the end-users of 3D, not the design and build but when you’re inspectors and maintenance engineers that’s when you use our software. We’ve got about 20% of the market, that’s over 70 different installations, our primary market has been North America and the Middle East and we’re using that base to introduce this expert system that does add substantial benefit to what we do. We kind of aggregate data for a visualisation and we place nearly 2,000 plus information tags on our 3D model, what that’s done is generate a mountain of information to be analysed and interpreted and then reported on. In fact so much information, we can’t do it just with human assets, you need artificial intelligence (AI) which is exactly why we engaged with the guys at Arria NLG and sounded to be by far the most appropriate tool to aggregate data the way we aggregate visualisation.
Q3: Now you mentioned this a minute ago, does AI play an active role in the oil and gas space?
A3: It hasn’t done in terms of, I’d say, commercial application. There’s been a lot of research and development done but I think it has needed software companies such as Arria and ourselves to really look at how this new paradigm of information systems can be applied. For us, it’s really around ‘can I put enough engineers in a refinery or on an oil platform’, you just can’t get that many to deal with the volume of data so you’ve got to automate that just as the way you would automate other processes.
Q4: John, How do you see it shaping the sector in the future?
A4: I just think it’s an essential tool now, you’ve got to monitor all of these assets in a field. The implications of an asset not being well maintained or failing, the cost of that, is so outlandish that people are really scrambling to find what they can do to manage this huge volume of data and get value from the data. So not just to monitor it but create value propositions internally that help them run their businesses better so it’s essential, it’s an obvious move that people will have to take.
Q5: Matt, can Arria NLG PLC add a narrative layer to any existing software?
A5: Yes, so the way to think of it is we emulate expertise so if you hear what John said there so clearly all of these tags cross complex assets capturing data that still has to be read, understood and acted upon by human experts in the system. So by taking those human experts and replicating their wisdom, if you like, into the artificial intelligence system that Arria’s NLG platform provides, using some of the subject matter expertise that John’s company has in spades, allows us to take that data as a human expert but at great scale in real time. So it’s not so much that we can add artificial intelligence to any company’s data that may or may not be true depending on the context, what we can do is we can emulate any subject matter experts reporting on data through understanding how they report on that data by understanding how they think, how they approach that data via language so we look at what they write, what they report on and that tells us what’s happening in the data and we replicate that back. So it’s a very different approach to the usual statistical modelling that a lot of other artificial intelligence’s provide especially in this mission crucial engineering context that John is describing. In many ways there’s no other way to do it than by talking to the expert, talking to the field engineers, understand what they’re looking at, understanding what problems they’re trying to remediate, capturing their intelligence and wisdom via the language they use and putting it into our platform.
