New sophisticated artificial intelligence tools are coming to oil and gas. There’s plenty of upside, but lots of worries too.

Language processing has been one of those things that humans have claimed to be uniquely of our species. Sure, other creatures are known to communicate with each other using sound—whales sing, dolphins chirp, and dogs bark—but only humans have created symbols to abstractly represent language, to allow language to be taught, to codify its usage, and to reduce the potential for misinterpretation.

Imagine a bot with unlimited patience, unlimited but flawed technical depth on a range of topics, continuously learning, fluent in multiple languages, globally consistent, universally available, supremely self confident, frequently wrong, and massively parallel. Imagine if that bot relied instead on much internal corporate resources, and not exclusively on the flawed information sources of the wild internet.

How might such a content machine impact the oil and gas sector?