Stay Ahead, Stay ONMINE

Fueling the future of digital transformation

In partnership withInfosys Cobalt In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital innovation, staying adaptable isn’t just a strategy—it’s a survival skill. “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face,” says Luis Niño, digital manager for technology ventures and innovation at Chevron, quoting Mike Tyson. Drawing from a career that spans IT, HR, and infrastructure operations across the globe, Niño offers a unique perspective on innovation and how organizational microcultures within Chevron shape how digital transformation evolves.  Centralized functions prioritize efficiency, relying on tools like AI, data analytics, and scalable system architectures. Meanwhile, business units focus on simplicity and effectiveness, deploying robotics and edge computing to meet site-specific needs and ensure safety. “From a digital transformation standpoint, what I have learned is that you have to tie your technology to what outcomes drive results for both areas, but you have to allow yourself to be flexible, to be nimble, and to understand that change is constant,” he says. Central to this transformation is the rise of industrial AI. Unlike consumer applications, industrial AI operates in high-stakes environments where the cost of errors can be severe.  “The wealth of potential information needs to be contextualized, modeled, and governed because of the safety of those underlying processes,” says Niño. “If a machine reacts in ways you don’t expect, people could get hurt, and so there’s an extra level of care that needs to happen and that we need to think about as we deploy these technologies.” Niño highlights Chevron’s efforts to use AI for predictive maintenance, subsurface analytics, and process automation, noting that “AI sits on top of that foundation of strong data management and robust telecommunications capabilities.” As such, AI is not just a tool but a transformation catalyst redefining how talent is managed, procurement is optimized, and safety is ensured. Looking ahead, Niño emphasizes the importance of adaptability and collaboration: “Transformation is as much about technology as it is about people.” With initiatives like the Citizen Developer Program and Learn Digital, Chevron is empowering its workforce to bridge the gap between emerging technologies and everyday operations using an iterative mindset.  Niño is also keeping watch over the convergence of technologies like AI, quantum computing, Internet of Things, and robotics, which hold the potential to transform how we produce and manage energy. “My job is to keep an eye on those developments,” says Niño, “to make sure that we’re managing these things responsibly and the things that we test and trial and the things that we deploy, that we maintain a strict sense of responsibility to make sure that we keep everyone safe, our employees, our customers, and also our stakeholders from a broader perspective.” This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Infosys Cobalt. Full Transcript  Megan Tatum: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Megan Tatum and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.  Our topic today is digital transformation, from back office operations to infrastructure in the field like oil rigs, companies continue to look for ways to increase profit, meet sustainability goals, and invest in the latest and greatest technology.  Two words for you: enabling innovation.  My guest is Luis Niño, who is the digital manager of technology ventures, and innovation at Chevron. This podcast is produced in association with Infosys Cobalt.  Welcome, Luis.  Luis Niño: Thank you, Megan. Thank you for having me.  Megan: Thank you so much for joining us. Just to set some context, Luis, you’ve had a really diverse career at Chevron, spanning IT, HR, and infrastructure operations. I wonder, how have those different roles shaped your approach to innovation and digital strategy?  Luis: Thank you for the question. And you’re right, my career has spanned many different areas and geographies in the company. It really feels like I’ve worked for different companies every time I change roles. Like I said, different functions, organizations, locations I’ve had since here in Houston and in Bakersfield, California and in Buenos Aires, Argentina. From an organizational standpoint, I’ve seen central teams international service centers, as you mentioned, field infrastructure and operation organizations in our business units, and I’ve also had corporate function roles.  And the reason why I mentioned that diversity is that each one of those looks at digital transformation and innovation through its own lens. From the priority to scale and streamline in central organizations to the need to optimize and simplify out in business units and what I like to call the periphery, you really learn about the concept first off of microcultures and how different these organizations can be even within our own walls, but also how those come together in organizations like Chevron.  Over time, I would highlight two things. In central organizations, whether that’s functions like IT, HR, or our technical center, we have a central technical center, where we continuously look for efficiencies in scaling, for system architectures that allow for economies of scale. As you can imagine, the name of the game is efficiency. We have also looked to improve employee experience. We want to orchestrate ecosystems of large technology vendors that give us an edge and move the massive organization forward. In areas like this, in central areas like this, I would say that it is data analytics, data science, and artificial intelligence that has become the sort of the fundamental tools to achieve those objectives.  Now, if you allow that pendulum to swing out to the business units and to the periphery, the name of the game is effectiveness and simplicity. The priority for the business units is to find and execute technologies that help us achieve the local objectives and keep our people safe. Especially when we are talking about our manufacturing environments where there’s risk for our folks. In these areas, technologies like robotics, the Internet of Things, and obviously edge computing are currently the enablers of information.  I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to say that both of those, let’s call it, areas of the company, rely on the same foundation and that is a foundation of strong data management, of strong network and telecommunications capabilities because those are the veins through which the data flows and everything relies on data.  In my experience, this pendulum also drives our technology priorities and our technology strategy. From a digital transformation standpoint, what I have learned is that you have to tie your technology to what outcomes drive results for both areas, but you have to allow yourself to be flexible, to be nimble, and to understand that change is constant. If you are deploying something in the center and you suddenly realize that some business unit already has a solution, you cannot just say, let’s shut it down and go with what I said. You have to adapt, you have to understand behavioral change management and you really have to make sure that change and adjustments are your bread and butter.  I don’t know if you know this, Megan, but there’s a popular fight happening this weekend with Mike Tyson and he has a saying, and that is everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And what he’s trying to say is you have to be adaptable. The plan is good, but you have to make sure that you remain agile.  Megan: Yeah, absolutely.  Luis: And then I guess the last lesson really quick is about risk management or maybe risk appetite. Each group has its own risk appetite depending on the lens or where they’re sitting, and this may create some conflict between organizations that want to move really, really fast and have urgency and others that want to take a step back and make sure that we’re doing things right at the balance. I think that at the end, I think that’s a question for leadership to make sure that they have a pulse on our ability to change.  Megan: Absolutely, and you’ve mentioned a few different elements and technologies I’d love to dig into a bit more detail on. One of which is artificial intelligence because I know Chevron has been exploring AI for several years now. I wonder if you could tell us about some of the AI use cases it’s working on and what frameworks you’ve developed for effective adoption as well.  Luis: Yeah, absolutely. This is the big one, isn’t it? Everybody’s talking about AI. As you can imagine, the focus in our company is what is now being branded as industrial AI. That’s really a simple term to explain that AI is being applied to industrial and manufacturing settings. And like other AI, and as I mentioned before, the foundation remains data. I want to stress the importance of data here.  One of the differences however is that in the case of industrial AI, data comes from a variety of sources. Some of them are very critical. Some of them are non-critical. Sources like operating technologies, process control networks, and SCADA, all the way to Internet of Things sensors or industrial Internet of Things sensors, and unstructured data like engineering documentation and IT data. These are massive amounts of information coming from different places and also from different security structures. The complexity of industrial AI is considerably higher than what I would call consumer or productivity AI.  Megan: Right.  Luis: The wealth of potential information needs to be contextualized, modeled, and governed because of the safety of those underlying processes. When you’re in an industrial setting, if a machine reacts in ways you don’t expect, people could get hurt, and so there’s an extra level of care that needs to happen and that we need to think about as we deploy these technologies.  AI sits on top of that foundation and it takes different shapes. It can show up as a copilot like the ones that have been popularized recently, or it can show up as agentic AI, which is something that we’re looking at closely now. And agentic AI is just a term to mean that AI can operate autonomously and can use complex reasoning to solve multistep problems in an industrial setting.  So with that in mind, going back to your question, we use both kinds of AI for multiple use cases, including predictive maintenance, subsurface analytics, process automation, and workflow optimization, and also end-user productivity. Each one of those use cases obviously needs specific objectives that the business is looking at in each area of the value chain.  In predictive maintenance, for example, we monitor and we analyze equipment health, we prevent failures, and we allow for preventive maintenance and reduced downtime. The AI helps us understand when machinery needs to be maintained in order to prevent failure instead of just waiting for it to happen. In subsurface analysis, we’re exploring AI to develop better models of hydrocarbon reservoirs. We are exploring AI to forecast geomechanical models and to capture and understand data from fiber optic sensing. Fiber optic sensing is a capability that has proven very valuable to us, and AI is helping us make sense of the wealth of information that comes out of the whole, as we like to say. Of course, we don’t do this alone. We partner with many third-party organizations, with vendors, and with people inside subject matter experts inside of Chevron to move the projects forward.  There are several other areas beyond industrial AI that we are looking at. AI really is a transformation catalyst, and so areas like finance and law and procurement and HR, we’re also doing testing in those corporate areas. I can tell you that I’ve been part of projects in procurement, in HR. When I was in HR we ran a pretty amazing effort in partnership with a third-party company, and what they do is they seek to transform the way we understand talent, and the way they do that is they are trying to provide data-driven frameworks to make talent decisions.  And so they redefine talent by framing data in the form of skills, and as they do this, they help de-bias processes that are usually or can be usually prone to unconscious biases and perspectives. It really is fascinating to think of your talent-based skills and to start decoupling them from what we know since the industrial era began, which is people fit in jobs. Now the question is more the other way around. How can jobs adapt to people’s skills? And then in procurement, AI is basically helping us open the aperture to a wider array of vendors in an automated fashion that makes us better partners. It’s more cost-effective. It’s really helpful.  Before I close here, you did reference frameworks, so the framework of industrial AI versus what I call productivity AI, the understanding of the use cases. All of this sits on top of our responsible AI frameworks. We have set up a central enterprise AI organization and they have really done a great job in developing key areas of responsible AI as well as training and adoption frameworks. This includes how to use AI, how not to use AI, what data we can share with the different GPTs that are available to us.  We are now members of organizations like the Responsible AI Institute. This is an organization that fosters the safe use of AI and trustworthy AI. But our own responsible AI framework, it involves four pillars. The first one is the principles, and this is how we make sure we continue to stay aligned with the values that drive this company, which we call The Chevron Way. It includes assessment, making sure that we evaluate these solutions in proportion to impact and risk. As I mentioned, when you’re talking about industrial processes, people’s lives are at stake. And so we take a very close look at what we are putting out there and how we ensure that it keeps our people safe. It includes education, I mentioned training our people to augment their capabilities and reinforcing responsible principles, and the last of the four is governance oversight and accountability through control structures that we are putting in place.  Megan: Fantastic. Thank you so much for those really fascinating specific examples as well. It’s great to hear about. And digital transformation, which you did touch on briefly, has become critical of course to enable business growth and innovation. I wonder what has Chevron’s digital transformation looked like and how has the shift affected overall operations and the way employees engage with technology as well?  Luis: Yeah, yeah. That’s a really good question. The term digital transformation is interpreted in many different ways. For me, it really is about leveraging technology to drive business results and to drive business transformation. We usually tend to specify emerging technology as the catalyst for transformation. I think that is okay, but I also think that there are ways that you can drive digital transformation with technology that’s not necessarily emerging but is being optimized, and so under this umbrella, we include everything from our Citizen Developer Program to complex industry partnerships that help us maximize the value of data.  The Citizen Developer Program has been very successful in helping bridge the gap between our technical software engineer and software development practices and people who are out there doing the work, getting familiar, and demystifying the way to build solutions.  I do believe that transformation is as much about technology as it is about people. And so to go back to the responsible AI framework, we are actively training and upskilling the workforce. We created a program called Learn Digital that helps employees embrace the technologies. I mentioned the concept of demystifying. It’s really important that people don’t fall into the trap of getting scared by the potential of the technology or the fact that it is new and we help them and we give them the tools to bridge the change management gap so they can get to use them and get the most out of them.  At a high level, our transformation has followed the cyclical nature that pretty much any transformation does. We have identified the data foundations that we need to have. We have understood the impact of the processes that we are trying to digitize. We organize that information, then we streamline and automate processes, we learn, and now machines learn and then we do it all over again. And so this cyclical mindset, this iterative mindset has really taken hold in our culture and it has made us a little bit better at accepting the technologies that are driving the change.  Megan: And to look at one of those technologies in a bit more detail, cloud computing has revolutionized infrastructure across industries. But there’s also a pendulum ship now toward hybrid and edge computing models. How is Chevron balancing cloud, hybrid, and edge strategies for optimal performance as well?  Luis: Yeah, that’s a great question and I think you could argue that was the genesis of the digital transformation effort. It’s been a journey for us and it’s a journey that I think we’re not the only ones that may have started it as a cost savings and storage play, but then we got to this ever-increasing need for multiple things like scaling compute power to support large language models and maximize how we run complex models. There’s an increasing need to store vast amounts of data for training and inference models while we improve data management and, while we predict future needs.  There’s a need for the opportunity to eliminate hardware constraints. One of the promises of cloud was that you would be able to ramp up and down depending on your compute needs as projects demanded. And that hasn’t stopped, that has only increased. And then there’s a need to be able to do this at a global level. For a company like ours that is distributed across the globe, we want to do this everywhere while actively managing those resources without the weight of the infrastructure that we used to carry on our books. Cloud has really helped us change the way we think about the digital assets that we have.  It’s important also that it has created this symbiotic need to grow between AI and the cloud. So you don’t have the AI without the cloud, but now you don’t have the cloud without AI. In reality, we work on balancing the benefits of cloud and hybrid and edge computing, and we keep operational efficiency as our North Star. We have key partnerships in cloud, that’s something that I want to make sure I talk about. Microsoft is probably the most strategic of our partnerships because they’ve helped us set our foundation for cloud. But we also think of the convenience of hybrid through the lens of leveraging a convenient, scalable public cloud and a very secure private cloud that helps us meet our operational and safety needs.  Edge computing fills the gap or the need for low latency and real-time data processing, which are critical constraints for decision-making in most of the locations where we operate. You can think of an offshore rig, a refinery, an oil rig out in the field, and maybe even not-so-remote areas like here in our corporate offices. Putting that compute power close to the data source is critical. So we work and we partner with vendors to enable lighter compute that we can set at the edge and, I mentioned the foundation earlier, faster communication protocols at the edge that also solve the need for speed.  But it is important to remember that you don’t want to think about edge computing and cloud as separate things. Cloud supports edge by providing centralized management by providing advanced analytics among others. You can train models in the cloud and then deploy them to edge devices, keeping real-time priorities in mind. I would say that edge computing also supports our cybersecurity strategy because it allows us to control and secure sensitive environments and information while we embed machine learning and AI capabilities out there.  So I have mentioned use cases like predictive maintenance and safety, those are good examples of areas where we want to make sure our cybersecurity strategy is front and center. When I was talking about my experience I talked about the center and the edge. Our strategy to balance that pendulum relies on flexibility and on effective asset management. And so making sure that our cloud reflects those strategic realities gives us a good footing to achieve our corporate objectives.  Megan: As you say, safety is a top priority. How do technologies like the Internet of Things and AI help enhance safety protocols specifically too, especially in the context of emissions tracking and leak detection?  Luis: Yeah, thank you for the question. Safety is the most important thing that we think and talk about here at Chevron. There is nothing more important than ensuring that our people are safe and healthy, so I would break safety down into two. Before I jump to emissions tracking and leak detection, I just want to make a quick point on personal safety and how we leverage IoT and AI to that end.  We use sensing capabilities that help us keep workers out of harm’s way, and so things like computer vision to identify and alert people who are coming into safety areas. We also use computer vision, for example, to identify PPE requirements—personal protective equipment requirements—and so if there are areas that require a certain type of clothing, a certain type of identification, or a hard hat, we are using technologies that can help us make sure people have that before they go into a particular area.  We’re also using wearables. Wearables help us in one of the use cases is they help us track exhaustion and dehydration in locations where that creates inherent risk, and so locations that are very hot, whether it’s because of the weather or because they are enclosed, we can use wearables that tell us how fast the person’s getting dehydrated, what are the levels of liquid or sodium that they need to make sure that they’re safe or if they need to take a break. We have those capabilities now.  Going back to emissions tracking and leak detection, I think it’s actually the combination of IoT and AI that can transform how we prevent and react to those. In this case, we also deploy sensing capabilities. We use things like computer vision, like infrared capabilities, and we use others that deliver data to the AI models, which then alert and enable rapid response.  The way I would explain how we use IoT and AI for safety, whether it’s personnel safety or emissions tracking and leak detection, is to think about sensors as the extension of human ability to sense. In some cases, you could argue it’s super abilities. And so if you think of sight normally you would’ve had supervisors or people out there that would be looking at the field and identifying issues. Well, now we can use computer vision with traditional RGB vision, we can use them with infrared, we can use multi-angle to identify patterns, and have AI tell us what’s going on.  If you keep thinking about the human senses, that’s sight, but you can also use sound through ultrasonic sensors or microphone sensors. You can use touch through vibration recognition and heat recognition. And even more recently, this is something that we are testing more recently, you can use smell. There are companies that are starting to digitize smell. Pretty exciting, also a little bit crazy. But it is happening. And so these are all tools that any human would use to identify risk. Well, so now we can do it as an extension of our human abilities to do so. This way we can react much faster and better to the anomalies.  A specific example with methane. We have a simple goal with methane, we want to keep methane in the pipe. Once it’s out, it’s really hard or almost impossible to take it back. Over the last six to seven years, we have reduced our methane intensity by over 60% and we’re leveraging technology to achieve that. We have deployed a methane detection program. We have trialed over 10 to 15 advanced methane detection technologies.  A technology that I have been looking at recently is called Aquanta Vision. This is a company supported by an incubator program we have called Chevron Studio. We did this in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and what they do is they leverage optical gas imaging to detect methane effectively and to allow us to prevent it from escaping the pipe. So that’s just an example of the technologies that we’re leveraging in this space.  Megan: Wow, that’s fascinating stuff. And on emissions as well, Chevron has made significant investments in new energy technologies like hydrogen, carbon capture, and renewables. How do these technologies fit into Chevron’s broader goal of reducing its carbon footprint?  Luis: This is obviously a fascinating space for us, one that is ever-changing. It is honestly not my area of expertise. But what I can say is we truly believe we can achieve high returns and lower carbon, and that’s something that we communicate broadly. A few years ago, I believe it was 2021, we established our Chevron New Energies company and they actively explore lower carbon alternatives including hydrogen, renewables, and carbon capture offsets.  My area, the digital area, and the convergence between digital technologies and the technical sciences will enable the techno-commercial viability of those business lines. Thinking about carbon capture, is something that we’ve done for a long time. We have decades of experience in carbon capture technologies across the world.  One of our larger projects, the Gorgon Project in Australia, I think they’ve captured something between 5 and 10 million tons of CO2 emissions in the past few years, and so we have good expertise in that space. But we also actively partner in carbon capture. We have joined hubs of carbon capture here in Houston, for example, where we investing in companies like there’s a company called Carbon Clean, a company called Carbon Engineering, and one called Svante. I’m familiar with these names because the corporate VC team is close to me. These companies provide technologies for direct air capture. They provide solutions for hard-to-abate industries. And so we want to keep an eye on these emerging capabilities and make use of them to continuously lower our carbon footprint.  There are two areas here that I would like to talk about. Hydrogen first. This is another area that we’re familiar with. Our plan is to build on our existing assets and capabilities to deliver a large-scale hydrogen business. Since 2005, I think we’ve been doing retail hydrogen, and we also have several partnerships there. In renewables, we are creating a range of fuels for different transportation types. We use diesel, bio-based diesel, we use renewable natural gas, we use sustainable aviation fuel. Yeah, so these are all areas of importance to us. They’re emerging business lines that are young in comparison to the rest of our company. We’ve been a company for 140 years plus, and this started in 2021, so you can imagine how steep that learning curve is.  I mentioned how we leverage our corporate venture capital team to learn and to keep an eye out on what are these emerging trends and technologies that we want to learn about. They leverage two things. They leverage a core fund, which is focused on areas that can seek innovation for our core business for the title. And we have a separate future energy fund that explores areas that are emerging. Not only do they invest in places like hydrogen, carbon capture, and renewables, but they also may invest in other areas like wind and geothermal and nuclear capability. So we constantly keep our eyes open for these emerging technologies.  Megan: I see. And I wonder if you could share a bit more actually about Chevron’s role in driving sustainable business innovation. I’m thinking of initiatives like converting used cooking oil into biodiesel, for example. I wonder how those contribute to that overall goal of creating a circular economy.  Luis: Yeah, this is fascinating and I was so happy to learn a little bit more about this year when I had the chance to visit our offices in Iowa. I’ll get into that in a second. But happy to talk about this, again with the caveat that it’s not my area of expertise.  Megan: Of course.  Luis: In the case of biodiesel, we acquired a company called REG in 2022. They were one of the founders of the renewable fuels industry, and they honestly do incredible work to create energy through a process, I forget the name of the process to be honest. But at the most basic level what they do is they prepare feedstocks that come from different types of biomass, you mentioned cooking oils, there’s also soybeans, there’s animal fats. And through various chemical reactions, what they do is convert components of the feedstock into biodiesel and glycerin. After that process, what they do is they separate un-reactive methanol, which is recovered and recycled into the process, and the biodiesel goes through a final processing to make sure that it meets the standards necessary to be commercialized.  What REG has done is it has boosted our knowledge as a broader organization on how to do this better. They continuously look for bio-feedstocks that can help us deliver new types of energy. I had mentioned bio-based diesel. One of the areas that we’re very focused on right now is sustainable aviation fuel. I find that fascinating. The reason why this is working and the reason why this is exciting is because they brought this great expertise and capability into Chevron. And in turn, as a larger organization, we’re able to leverage our manufacturing and distribution capabilities to continue to provide that value to our customers.  I mentioned that I learned a little bit more about this this year. I was lucky earlier in the year I was able to visit our REG offices in Ames, Iowa. That’s where they’re located. And I will tell you that the passion and commitment that those people have for the work that they do was incredibly energizing. These are folks who have helped us believe, really, that our promise of lower carbon is attainable.  Megan: Wow. Sounds like there’s some fascinating work going on. Which brings me to my final question. Which is sort of looking ahead, what emerging technologies are you most excited about and how do you see them impacting both Chevron’s core business and the energy sector as a whole as well?  Luis: Yeah, that’s a great question. I have no doubt that the energy business is changing and will continue to change only faster, both our core business as well as the future energy, or the way it’s going to look in the future. Honestly, in my line of work, I come across exciting technology every day. The obvious answers are AI and industrial AI. These are things that are already changing the way we live without a doubt. You can see it in people’s productivity. You can see it in how we optimize and transform workflows. AI is changing everything. I am actually very, very interested in IoT, in the Internet of Things, and robotics, the ability to protect humans in high-risk environments, like I mentioned, is critical to us, the opportunity to prevent high-risk events and predict when they’re likely to happen.  This is pretty massive, both for our productivity objectives as well as for our lower carbon objectives. If we can predict when we are at risk of particular events, we could avoid them altogether. As I mentioned before, this ubiquitous ability to sense our surroundings is a capability that our industry and I’m going to say humankind, is only beginning to explore.  There’s another area that I didn’t talk too much about, which I think is coming, and that is quantum computing. Quantum computing promises to change the way we think of compute power and it will unlock our ability to simulate chemistry, to simulate molecular dynamics in ways we have not been able to do before. We’re working really hard in this space. When I say molecular dynamics, think of the way that we produce energy today. It is all about the molecule and understanding the interactions between hydrocarbon molecules and the environment. The ability to do that in multi-variable systems is something that quantum, we believe, can provide an edge on, and so we’re working really hard in this space.  Yeah, there are so many, and having talked about all of them, AI, IoT, robotics, quantum, the most interesting thing to me is the convergence of all of them. If you think about the opportunity to leverage robotics, but also do it as the machines continue to control limited processes and understand what it is they need to do in a preventive and predictive way, this is such an incredible potential to transform our lives, to make an impact in the world for the better. We see that potential.  My job is to keep an eye on those developments, to make sure that we’re managing these things responsibly and the things that we test and trial and the things that we deploy, that we maintain a strict sense of responsibility to make sure that we keep everyone safe, our employees, our customers, and also our stakeholders from a broader perspective.  Megan: Absolutely. Such an important point to finish on. And unfortunately, that is all the time we have for today, but what a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on the Business Lab, Luis.  Luis: Great to talk to you.  Megan:  Thank you so much. That was Luis Niño, who is the digital manager of technology ventures and innovation at Chevron, who I spoke with today from Brighton, England.  That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m Megan Tatum, I’m your host and a contributing editor at Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you can find us in print on the web and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com.  This show is available wherever you get your podcasts, and if you enjoyed this episode, we really hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review, and this episode was produced by Giro Studios. Thank you so much for listening. 

In partnership withInfosys Cobalt

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital innovation, staying adaptable isn’t just a strategy—it’s a survival skill. “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face,” says Luis Niño, digital manager for technology ventures and innovation at Chevron, quoting Mike Tyson.

Drawing from a career that spans IT, HR, and infrastructure operations across the globe, Niño offers a unique perspective on innovation and how organizational microcultures within Chevron shape how digital transformation evolves. 

Centralized functions prioritize efficiency, relying on tools like AI, data analytics, and scalable system architectures. Meanwhile, business units focus on simplicity and effectiveness, deploying robotics and edge computing to meet site-specific needs and ensure safety.

“From a digital transformation standpoint, what I have learned is that you have to tie your technology to what outcomes drive results for both areas, but you have to allow yourself to be flexible, to be nimble, and to understand that change is constant,” he says.

Central to this transformation is the rise of industrial AI. Unlike consumer applications, industrial AI operates in high-stakes environments where the cost of errors can be severe. 

“The wealth of potential information needs to be contextualized, modeled, and governed because of the safety of those underlying processes,” says Niño. “If a machine reacts in ways you don’t expect, people could get hurt, and so there’s an extra level of care that needs to happen and that we need to think about as we deploy these technologies.”

Niño highlights Chevron’s efforts to use AI for predictive maintenance, subsurface analytics, and process automation, noting that “AI sits on top of that foundation of strong data management and robust telecommunications capabilities.” As such, AI is not just a tool but a transformation catalyst redefining how talent is managed, procurement is optimized, and safety is ensured.

Looking ahead, Niño emphasizes the importance of adaptability and collaboration: “Transformation is as much about technology as it is about people.” With initiatives like the Citizen Developer Program and Learn Digital, Chevron is empowering its workforce to bridge the gap between emerging technologies and everyday operations using an iterative mindset. 

Niño is also keeping watch over the convergence of technologies like AI, quantum computing, Internet of Things, and robotics, which hold the potential to transform how we produce and manage energy.

“My job is to keep an eye on those developments,” says Niño, “to make sure that we’re managing these things responsibly and the things that we test and trial and the things that we deploy, that we maintain a strict sense of responsibility to make sure that we keep everyone safe, our employees, our customers, and also our stakeholders from a broader perspective.”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Infosys Cobalt.

Full Transcript 

Megan Tatum: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Megan Tatum and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace. 

Our topic today is digital transformation, from back office operations to infrastructure in the field like oil rigs, companies continue to look for ways to increase profit, meet sustainability goals, and invest in the latest and greatest technology. 

Two words for you: enabling innovation. 

My guest is Luis Niño, who is the digital manager of technology ventures, and innovation at Chevron. This podcast is produced in association with Infosys Cobalt. 

Welcome, Luis. 

Luis Niño: Thank you, Megan. Thank you for having me. 

Megan: Thank you so much for joining us. Just to set some context, Luis, you’ve had a really diverse career at Chevron, spanning IT, HR, and infrastructure operations. I wonder, how have those different roles shaped your approach to innovation and digital strategy? 

Luis: Thank you for the question. And you’re right, my career has spanned many different areas and geographies in the company. It really feels like I’ve worked for different companies every time I change roles. Like I said, different functions, organizations, locations I’ve had since here in Houston and in Bakersfield, California and in Buenos Aires, Argentina. From an organizational standpoint, I’ve seen central teams international service centers, as you mentioned, field infrastructure and operation organizations in our business units, and I’ve also had corporate function roles. 

And the reason why I mentioned that diversity is that each one of those looks at digital transformation and innovation through its own lens. From the priority to scale and streamline in central organizations to the need to optimize and simplify out in business units and what I like to call the periphery, you really learn about the concept first off of microcultures and how different these organizations can be even within our own walls, but also how those come together in organizations like Chevron. 

Over time, I would highlight two things. In central organizations, whether that’s functions like IT, HR, or our technical center, we have a central technical center, where we continuously look for efficiencies in scaling, for system architectures that allow for economies of scale. As you can imagine, the name of the game is efficiency. We have also looked to improve employee experience. We want to orchestrate ecosystems of large technology vendors that give us an edge and move the massive organization forward. In areas like this, in central areas like this, I would say that it is data analytics, data science, and artificial intelligence that has become the sort of the fundamental tools to achieve those objectives. 

Now, if you allow that pendulum to swing out to the business units and to the periphery, the name of the game is effectiveness and simplicity. The priority for the business units is to find and execute technologies that help us achieve the local objectives and keep our people safe. Especially when we are talking about our manufacturing environments where there’s risk for our folks. In these areas, technologies like robotics, the Internet of Things, and obviously edge computing are currently the enablers of information. 

I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to say that both of those, let’s call it, areas of the company, rely on the same foundation and that is a foundation of strong data management, of strong network and telecommunications capabilities because those are the veins through which the data flows and everything relies on data. 

In my experience, this pendulum also drives our technology priorities and our technology strategy. From a digital transformation standpoint, what I have learned is that you have to tie your technology to what outcomes drive results for both areas, but you have to allow yourself to be flexible, to be nimble, and to understand that change is constant. If you are deploying something in the center and you suddenly realize that some business unit already has a solution, you cannot just say, let’s shut it down and go with what I said. You have to adapt, you have to understand behavioral change management and you really have to make sure that change and adjustments are your bread and butter. 

I don’t know if you know this, Megan, but there’s a popular fight happening this weekend with Mike Tyson and he has a saying, and that is everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And what he’s trying to say is you have to be adaptable. The plan is good, but you have to make sure that you remain agile. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. 

Luis: And then I guess the last lesson really quick is about risk management or maybe risk appetite. Each group has its own risk appetite depending on the lens or where they’re sitting, and this may create some conflict between organizations that want to move really, really fast and have urgency and others that want to take a step back and make sure that we’re doing things right at the balance. I think that at the end, I think that’s a question for leadership to make sure that they have a pulse on our ability to change. 

Megan: Absolutely, and you’ve mentioned a few different elements and technologies I’d love to dig into a bit more detail on. One of which is artificial intelligence because I know Chevron has been exploring AI for several years now. I wonder if you could tell us about some of the AI use cases it’s working on and what frameworks you’ve developed for effective adoption as well. 

Luis: Yeah, absolutely. This is the big one, isn’t it? Everybody’s talking about AI. As you can imagine, the focus in our company is what is now being branded as industrial AI. That’s really a simple term to explain that AI is being applied to industrial and manufacturing settings. And like other AI, and as I mentioned before, the foundation remains data. I want to stress the importance of data here. 

One of the differences however is that in the case of industrial AI, data comes from a variety of sources. Some of them are very critical. Some of them are non-critical. Sources like operating technologies, process control networks, and SCADA, all the way to Internet of Things sensors or industrial Internet of Things sensors, and unstructured data like engineering documentation and IT data. These are massive amounts of information coming from different places and also from different security structures. The complexity of industrial AI is considerably higher than what I would call consumer or productivity AI. 

Megan: Right. 

Luis: The wealth of potential information needs to be contextualized, modeled, and governed because of the safety of those underlying processes. When you’re in an industrial setting, if a machine reacts in ways you don’t expect, people could get hurt, and so there’s an extra level of care that needs to happen and that we need to think about as we deploy these technologies. 

AI sits on top of that foundation and it takes different shapes. It can show up as a copilot like the ones that have been popularized recently, or it can show up as agentic AI, which is something that we’re looking at closely now. And agentic AI is just a term to mean that AI can operate autonomously and can use complex reasoning to solve multistep problems in an industrial setting. 

So with that in mind, going back to your question, we use both kinds of AI for multiple use cases, including predictive maintenance, subsurface analytics, process automation, and workflow optimization, and also end-user productivity. Each one of those use cases obviously needs specific objectives that the business is looking at in each area of the value chain. 

In predictive maintenance, for example, we monitor and we analyze equipment health, we prevent failures, and we allow for preventive maintenance and reduced downtime. The AI helps us understand when machinery needs to be maintained in order to prevent failure instead of just waiting for it to happen. In subsurface analysis, we’re exploring AI to develop better models of hydrocarbon reservoirs. We are exploring AI to forecast geomechanical models and to capture and understand data from fiber optic sensing. Fiber optic sensing is a capability that has proven very valuable to us, and AI is helping us make sense of the wealth of information that comes out of the whole, as we like to say. Of course, we don’t do this alone. We partner with many third-party organizations, with vendors, and with people inside subject matter experts inside of Chevron to move the projects forward. 

There are several other areas beyond industrial AI that we are looking at. AI really is a transformation catalyst, and so areas like finance and law and procurement and HR, we’re also doing testing in those corporate areas. I can tell you that I’ve been part of projects in procurement, in HR. When I was in HR we ran a pretty amazing effort in partnership with a third-party company, and what they do is they seek to transform the way we understand talent, and the way they do that is they are trying to provide data-driven frameworks to make talent decisions. 

And so they redefine talent by framing data in the form of skills, and as they do this, they help de-bias processes that are usually or can be usually prone to unconscious biases and perspectives. It really is fascinating to think of your talent-based skills and to start decoupling them from what we know since the industrial era began, which is people fit in jobs. Now the question is more the other way around. How can jobs adapt to people’s skills? And then in procurement, AI is basically helping us open the aperture to a wider array of vendors in an automated fashion that makes us better partners. It’s more cost-effective. It’s really helpful. 

Before I close here, you did reference frameworks, so the framework of industrial AI versus what I call productivity AI, the understanding of the use cases. All of this sits on top of our responsible AI frameworks. We have set up a central enterprise AI organization and they have really done a great job in developing key areas of responsible AI as well as training and adoption frameworks. This includes how to use AI, how not to use AI, what data we can share with the different GPTs that are available to us. 

We are now members of organizations like the Responsible AI Institute. This is an organization that fosters the safe use of AI and trustworthy AI. But our own responsible AI framework, it involves four pillars. The first one is the principles, and this is how we make sure we continue to stay aligned with the values that drive this company, which we call The Chevron Way. It includes assessment, making sure that we evaluate these solutions in proportion to impact and risk. As I mentioned, when you’re talking about industrial processes, people’s lives are at stake. And so we take a very close look at what we are putting out there and how we ensure that it keeps our people safe. It includes education, I mentioned training our people to augment their capabilities and reinforcing responsible principles, and the last of the four is governance oversight and accountability through control structures that we are putting in place. 

Megan: Fantastic. Thank you so much for those really fascinating specific examples as well. It’s great to hear about. And digital transformation, which you did touch on briefly, has become critical of course to enable business growth and innovation. I wonder what has Chevron’s digital transformation looked like and how has the shift affected overall operations and the way employees engage with technology as well? 

Luis: Yeah, yeah. That’s a really good question. The term digital transformation is interpreted in many different ways. For me, it really is about leveraging technology to drive business results and to drive business transformation. We usually tend to specify emerging technology as the catalyst for transformation. I think that is okay, but I also think that there are ways that you can drive digital transformation with technology that’s not necessarily emerging but is being optimized, and so under this umbrella, we include everything from our Citizen Developer Program to complex industry partnerships that help us maximize the value of data. 

The Citizen Developer Program has been very successful in helping bridge the gap between our technical software engineer and software development practices and people who are out there doing the work, getting familiar, and demystifying the way to build solutions. 

I do believe that transformation is as much about technology as it is about people. And so to go back to the responsible AI framework, we are actively training and upskilling the workforce. We created a program called Learn Digital that helps employees embrace the technologies. I mentioned the concept of demystifying. It’s really important that people don’t fall into the trap of getting scared by the potential of the technology or the fact that it is new and we help them and we give them the tools to bridge the change management gap so they can get to use them and get the most out of them. 

At a high level, our transformation has followed the cyclical nature that pretty much any transformation does. We have identified the data foundations that we need to have. We have understood the impact of the processes that we are trying to digitize. We organize that information, then we streamline and automate processes, we learn, and now machines learn and then we do it all over again. And so this cyclical mindset, this iterative mindset has really taken hold in our culture and it has made us a little bit better at accepting the technologies that are driving the change. 

Megan: And to look at one of those technologies in a bit more detail, cloud computing has revolutionized infrastructure across industries. But there’s also a pendulum ship now toward hybrid and edge computing models. How is Chevron balancing cloud, hybrid, and edge strategies for optimal performance as well? 

Luis: Yeah, that’s a great question and I think you could argue that was the genesis of the digital transformation effort. It’s been a journey for us and it’s a journey that I think we’re not the only ones that may have started it as a cost savings and storage play, but then we got to this ever-increasing need for multiple things like scaling compute power to support large language models and maximize how we run complex models. There’s an increasing need to store vast amounts of data for training and inference models while we improve data management and, while we predict future needs. 

There’s a need for the opportunity to eliminate hardware constraints. One of the promises of cloud was that you would be able to ramp up and down depending on your compute needs as projects demanded. And that hasn’t stopped, that has only increased. And then there’s a need to be able to do this at a global level. For a company like ours that is distributed across the globe, we want to do this everywhere while actively managing those resources without the weight of the infrastructure that we used to carry on our books. Cloud has really helped us change the way we think about the digital assets that we have. 

It’s important also that it has created this symbiotic need to grow between AI and the cloud. So you don’t have the AI without the cloud, but now you don’t have the cloud without AI. In reality, we work on balancing the benefits of cloud and hybrid and edge computing, and we keep operational efficiency as our North Star. We have key partnerships in cloud, that’s something that I want to make sure I talk about. Microsoft is probably the most strategic of our partnerships because they’ve helped us set our foundation for cloud. But we also think of the convenience of hybrid through the lens of leveraging a convenient, scalable public cloud and a very secure private cloud that helps us meet our operational and safety needs. 

Edge computing fills the gap or the need for low latency and real-time data processing, which are critical constraints for decision-making in most of the locations where we operate. You can think of an offshore rig, a refinery, an oil rig out in the field, and maybe even not-so-remote areas like here in our corporate offices. Putting that compute power close to the data source is critical. So we work and we partner with vendors to enable lighter compute that we can set at the edge and, I mentioned the foundation earlier, faster communication protocols at the edge that also solve the need for speed. 

But it is important to remember that you don’t want to think about edge computing and cloud as separate things. Cloud supports edge by providing centralized management by providing advanced analytics among others. You can train models in the cloud and then deploy them to edge devices, keeping real-time priorities in mind. I would say that edge computing also supports our cybersecurity strategy because it allows us to control and secure sensitive environments and information while we embed machine learning and AI capabilities out there. 

So I have mentioned use cases like predictive maintenance and safety, those are good examples of areas where we want to make sure our cybersecurity strategy is front and center. When I was talking about my experience I talked about the center and the edge. Our strategy to balance that pendulum relies on flexibility and on effective asset management. And so making sure that our cloud reflects those strategic realities gives us a good footing to achieve our corporate objectives. 

Megan: As you say, safety is a top priority. How do technologies like the Internet of Things and AI help enhance safety protocols specifically too, especially in the context of emissions tracking and leak detection? 

Luis: Yeah, thank you for the question. Safety is the most important thing that we think and talk about here at Chevron. There is nothing more important than ensuring that our people are safe and healthy, so I would break safety down into two. Before I jump to emissions tracking and leak detection, I just want to make a quick point on personal safety and how we leverage IoT and AI to that end. 

We use sensing capabilities that help us keep workers out of harm’s way, and so things like computer vision to identify and alert people who are coming into safety areas. We also use computer vision, for example, to identify PPE requirements—personal protective equipment requirements—and so if there are areas that require a certain type of clothing, a certain type of identification, or a hard hat, we are using technologies that can help us make sure people have that before they go into a particular area. 

We’re also using wearables. Wearables help us in one of the use cases is they help us track exhaustion and dehydration in locations where that creates inherent risk, and so locations that are very hot, whether it’s because of the weather or because they are enclosed, we can use wearables that tell us how fast the person’s getting dehydrated, what are the levels of liquid or sodium that they need to make sure that they’re safe or if they need to take a break. We have those capabilities now. 

Going back to emissions tracking and leak detection, I think it’s actually the combination of IoT and AI that can transform how we prevent and react to those. In this case, we also deploy sensing capabilities. We use things like computer vision, like infrared capabilities, and we use others that deliver data to the AI models, which then alert and enable rapid response. 

The way I would explain how we use IoT and AI for safety, whether it’s personnel safety or emissions tracking and leak detection, is to think about sensors as the extension of human ability to sense. In some cases, you could argue it’s super abilities. And so if you think of sight normally you would’ve had supervisors or people out there that would be looking at the field and identifying issues. Well, now we can use computer vision with traditional RGB vision, we can use them with infrared, we can use multi-angle to identify patterns, and have AI tell us what’s going on. 

If you keep thinking about the human senses, that’s sight, but you can also use sound through ultrasonic sensors or microphone sensors. You can use touch through vibration recognition and heat recognition. And even more recently, this is something that we are testing more recently, you can use smell. There are companies that are starting to digitize smell. Pretty exciting, also a little bit crazy. But it is happening. And so these are all tools that any human would use to identify risk. Well, so now we can do it as an extension of our human abilities to do so. This way we can react much faster and better to the anomalies. 

A specific example with methane. We have a simple goal with methane, we want to keep methane in the pipe. Once it’s out, it’s really hard or almost impossible to take it back. Over the last six to seven years, we have reduced our methane intensity by over 60% and we’re leveraging technology to achieve that. We have deployed a methane detection program. We have trialed over 10 to 15 advanced methane detection technologies. 

A technology that I have been looking at recently is called Aquanta Vision. This is a company supported by an incubator program we have called Chevron Studio. We did this in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and what they do is they leverage optical gas imaging to detect methane effectively and to allow us to prevent it from escaping the pipe. So that’s just an example of the technologies that we’re leveraging in this space. 

Megan: Wow, that’s fascinating stuff. And on emissions as well, Chevron has made significant investments in new energy technologies like hydrogen, carbon capture, and renewables. How do these technologies fit into Chevron’s broader goal of reducing its carbon footprint? 

Luis: This is obviously a fascinating space for us, one that is ever-changing. It is honestly not my area of expertise. But what I can say is we truly believe we can achieve high returns and lower carbon, and that’s something that we communicate broadly. A few years ago, I believe it was 2021, we established our Chevron New Energies company and they actively explore lower carbon alternatives including hydrogen, renewables, and carbon capture offsets. 

My area, the digital area, and the convergence between digital technologies and the technical sciences will enable the techno-commercial viability of those business lines. Thinking about carbon capture, is something that we’ve done for a long time. We have decades of experience in carbon capture technologies across the world. 

One of our larger projects, the Gorgon Project in Australia, I think they’ve captured something between 5 and 10 million tons of CO2 emissions in the past few years, and so we have good expertise in that space. But we also actively partner in carbon capture. We have joined hubs of carbon capture here in Houston, for example, where we investing in companies like there’s a company called Carbon Clean, a company called Carbon Engineering, and one called Svante. I’m familiar with these names because the corporate VC team is close to me. These companies provide technologies for direct air capture. They provide solutions for hard-to-abate industries. And so we want to keep an eye on these emerging capabilities and make use of them to continuously lower our carbon footprint. 

There are two areas here that I would like to talk about. Hydrogen first. This is another area that we’re familiar with. Our plan is to build on our existing assets and capabilities to deliver a large-scale hydrogen business. Since 2005, I think we’ve been doing retail hydrogen, and we also have several partnerships there. In renewables, we are creating a range of fuels for different transportation types. We use diesel, bio-based diesel, we use renewable natural gas, we use sustainable aviation fuel. Yeah, so these are all areas of importance to us. They’re emerging business lines that are young in comparison to the rest of our company. We’ve been a company for 140 years plus, and this started in 2021, so you can imagine how steep that learning curve is. 

I mentioned how we leverage our corporate venture capital team to learn and to keep an eye out on what are these emerging trends and technologies that we want to learn about. They leverage two things. They leverage a core fund, which is focused on areas that can seek innovation for our core business for the title. And we have a separate future energy fund that explores areas that are emerging. Not only do they invest in places like hydrogen, carbon capture, and renewables, but they also may invest in other areas like wind and geothermal and nuclear capability. So we constantly keep our eyes open for these emerging technologies. 

Megan: I see. And I wonder if you could share a bit more actually about Chevron’s role in driving sustainable business innovation. I’m thinking of initiatives like converting used cooking oil into biodiesel, for example. I wonder how those contribute to that overall goal of creating a circular economy. 

Luis: Yeah, this is fascinating and I was so happy to learn a little bit more about this year when I had the chance to visit our offices in Iowa. I’ll get into that in a second. But happy to talk about this, again with the caveat that it’s not my area of expertise. 

Megan: Of course. 

Luis: In the case of biodiesel, we acquired a company called REG in 2022. They were one of the founders of the renewable fuels industry, and they honestly do incredible work to create energy through a process, I forget the name of the process to be honest. But at the most basic level what they do is they prepare feedstocks that come from different types of biomass, you mentioned cooking oils, there’s also soybeans, there’s animal fats. And through various chemical reactions, what they do is convert components of the feedstock into biodiesel and glycerin. After that process, what they do is they separate un-reactive methanol, which is recovered and recycled into the process, and the biodiesel goes through a final processing to make sure that it meets the standards necessary to be commercialized. 

What REG has done is it has boosted our knowledge as a broader organization on how to do this better. They continuously look for bio-feedstocks that can help us deliver new types of energy. I had mentioned bio-based diesel. One of the areas that we’re very focused on right now is sustainable aviation fuel. I find that fascinating. The reason why this is working and the reason why this is exciting is because they brought this great expertise and capability into Chevron. And in turn, as a larger organization, we’re able to leverage our manufacturing and distribution capabilities to continue to provide that value to our customers. 

I mentioned that I learned a little bit more about this this year. I was lucky earlier in the year I was able to visit our REG offices in Ames, Iowa. That’s where they’re located. And I will tell you that the passion and commitment that those people have for the work that they do was incredibly energizing. These are folks who have helped us believe, really, that our promise of lower carbon is attainable. 

Megan: Wow. Sounds like there’s some fascinating work going on. Which brings me to my final question. Which is sort of looking ahead, what emerging technologies are you most excited about and how do you see them impacting both Chevron’s core business and the energy sector as a whole as well? 

Luis: Yeah, that’s a great question. I have no doubt that the energy business is changing and will continue to change only faster, both our core business as well as the future energy, or the way it’s going to look in the future. Honestly, in my line of work, I come across exciting technology every day. The obvious answers are AI and industrial AI. These are things that are already changing the way we live without a doubt. You can see it in people’s productivity. You can see it in how we optimize and transform workflows. AI is changing everything. I am actually very, very interested in IoT, in the Internet of Things, and robotics, the ability to protect humans in high-risk environments, like I mentioned, is critical to us, the opportunity to prevent high-risk events and predict when they’re likely to happen. 

This is pretty massive, both for our productivity objectives as well as for our lower carbon objectives. If we can predict when we are at risk of particular events, we could avoid them altogether. As I mentioned before, this ubiquitous ability to sense our surroundings is a capability that our industry and I’m going to say humankind, is only beginning to explore. 

There’s another area that I didn’t talk too much about, which I think is coming, and that is quantum computing. Quantum computing promises to change the way we think of compute power and it will unlock our ability to simulate chemistry, to simulate molecular dynamics in ways we have not been able to do before. We’re working really hard in this space. When I say molecular dynamics, think of the way that we produce energy today. It is all about the molecule and understanding the interactions between hydrocarbon molecules and the environment. The ability to do that in multi-variable systems is something that quantum, we believe, can provide an edge on, and so we’re working really hard in this space. 

Yeah, there are so many, and having talked about all of them, AI, IoT, robotics, quantum, the most interesting thing to me is the convergence of all of them. If you think about the opportunity to leverage robotics, but also do it as the machines continue to control limited processes and understand what it is they need to do in a preventive and predictive way, this is such an incredible potential to transform our lives, to make an impact in the world for the better. We see that potential. 

My job is to keep an eye on those developments, to make sure that we’re managing these things responsibly and the things that we test and trial and the things that we deploy, that we maintain a strict sense of responsibility to make sure that we keep everyone safe, our employees, our customers, and also our stakeholders from a broader perspective. 

Megan: Absolutely. Such an important point to finish on. And unfortunately, that is all the time we have for today, but what a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on the Business Lab, Luis. 

Luis: Great to talk to you. 

Megan:  Thank you so much. That was Luis Niño, who is the digital manager of technology ventures and innovation at Chevron, who I spoke with today from Brighton, England. 

That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m Megan Tatum, I’m your host and a contributing editor at Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you can find us in print on the web and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com. 

This show is available wherever you get your podcasts, and if you enjoyed this episode, we really hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review, and this episode was produced by Giro Studios. Thank you so much for listening. 

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Kinder Morgan Pipelines Return to Service

Kinder Morgan’s SFPP West and CALNEV pipelines have returned to service, a Kinder Morgan representative revealed to Rigzone on Tuesday. “There are currently no significant impacts to our operations,” a media statement sent to Rigzone by the representative yesterday, which had a timestamp of 10:25am CT on January 13, noted. “We continue to actively monitor the California wildfires and will work with our customers on any potential impacts,” it added. A media statement sent to Rigzone by the representative yesterday, with a timestamp of 11:25am CT on January 8, said, “the fires are not directly impacting our operations” but added that “the SFPP West and CALNEV pipelines were shut down due to power outages in the area”. “We expect the lines to resume service once the power has been restored,” it added. A media statement sent to Rigzone by the representative on Tuesday, with a timestamp of 12:15pm  CT on January 9, stated that the SFPP West and CALNEV pipelines “remain shut down due to power outages in the area”. “We continue to monitor the situation and expect the lines to resume service once the power has been restored,” that statement added. Kinder Morgan’s SFPP system comprises the North Line, the San Diego Line, the Oregon Line, the West Line, and the East Line, the company’s website shows. The West Line “is approximately 515 miles of primary pipeline and currently transports products from the Los Angeles Basin to Colton and Imperial, California, and Phoenix, Arizona,” the site states. Kinder Morgan’s 566-mile CALNEV pipeline system transports gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from Los Angeles, California, refineries and marine terminals through parallel 14-inch and 8-inch diameter pipelines that originate in Colton, California, and extend to terminals in Barstow, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, the company’s site notes. The pipeline system also serves

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Trump’s Pick for Energy Secretary Vows to ‘Unleash’ USA Expansion

Donald Trump’s choice for Energy secretary said the US must remove bureaucratic barriers and “unleash” production of nuclear power as well as liquified natural gas, according to written testimony before his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.  “The security of our nation begins with energy,” Chris Wright said in remarks prepared for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Previous administrations have viewed energy as a liability instead of the immense national asset that it is.”  Wright, the founder of Liberty Energy Inc., an oil and natural gas fracking services company, said his priorities would also include a focus on innovation and technology breakthroughs. Testifying on his 60th birthday, he said his first priority was to “unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore energy dominance,” a term that resonated throughout the first Trump administration. As Liberty’s chief executive officer, Wright has been an unapologetic advocate for his industry, proclaiming the moral virtues of fossil fuels and even drank fracking fluid to refute opponents who questioned its safety.  The choice of Wright, who has no previous Washington experience, is indicative of the incoming president’s hard pivot toward fossil fuels after years of Biden administration policies that benefited renewable energy and sought to restrict global warming.  He has assailed subsidies for wind and solar power and said fossil fuels were crucial for spreading prosperity and lifting people from poverty. He has called the threat posed by climate change exaggerated. “There is no climate crisis. And we are not in the midst of an energy transition either,” Wright said in a video posted on his LinkedIn page. “Life on earth is simply impossible without carbon dioxide — hence the term carbon pollution is outrageous.” While the Energy Department has little authority over oil and gas development, Wright, if confirmed, would oversee an organization with a vast,

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US Government Study Supports Further RE Expansion on Federal Lands

An inter-agency study has found that federal lands in the contiguous United States could further support hundreds more gigawatts of renewable energy (RE) generation even when assuming limited siting. The study by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), conducted in cooperation with the agriculture, defense and interior departments, found there is technical potential for 5,750 gigawatts (GW) of utility photovoltaic (UPV) installations on 44 million acres of developable federal land across the contiguous U.S. The term refers to the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia and excludes Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. territories. For onshore wind, the technical potential — the maximum amount of available resource based on the amount of federal land administered, suitability of the land for RE development, and the energy resource availability — is 875 GW on 43 million acres. Meanwhile the technical potential for hydrothermal is 130 GW on 12 million acres while that for enhanced geothermal is 975 GW on 27 million acres. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has the highest technical potential of all federal land administrators, followed by the Forest Service and the Defense Department.  “DOE, FWS [Fish and Wildlife Service], and other federal land administrators have relatively modest RE technical potential”, stated the report published on NREL’s website. “When modeling a limited-siting case, we estimate the technical potential on federal lands to decline by 70 percent (to 1,750 GW) for UPV and by 96 percent (to 70 GW) for wind, compared to the reference siting case”, the report said. Out of seven scenarios presented in the report, the three central scenarios estimate 51–84 GW of solar, wind and geothermal capacity are deployed onshore the contiguous U.S. by 2035, when the country should have achieved 100 percent clean power as targeted. The scenarios are based on various factors including technology

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8 Trends That Will Shape the Data Center Industry In 2025

What lies ahead for the data center industry in 2025? At Data Center Frontier, our eyes are always on the horizon, and we’re constantly talking with industry thought leaders to get their take on key trends. Our Magic 8 Ball prognostications did pretty well last year, so now it’s time to look ahead at what’s in store for the industry over the next 12 months, as we identify eight themes that stand to shape the data center business going forward. We’ll be writing in more depth about many of these trends, but this list provides a view of the topics that we believe will be most relevant in 2025. A publication about the future frontiers of data centers and AI shouldn’t be afraid to put it’s money where its mouth is, and that’s why we used AI tools to help research and compose this year’s annual industry trends forecast. The article is meant to be a bit encyclopedic in the spirit of a digest, less than an exactly prescriptive forecast – although we try to go there as well. The piece contains some dark horse trends. Do we think immersion cooling is going to explode this year, suddenly giving direct-to-chip a run for its money? Not exactly. But do we think that, given the enormous and rapidly expanding parameters of the AI and HPC boom, the sector for immersion cooling could see some breakthroughs this year? Seems reasonable. Ditto for the trends forecasting natural gas and quantum computing advancements. Such topics are definitely on the horizon and highly visible on the frontier of data centers, so we’d better learn more about them, was our thought. Because as borne out by recent history, data center industry trends that start at the bleeding edge (pun intended – also, on the list) sometimes

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Podcast: Data Center and AI Sustainability Imperatives with iMasons Climate Accord Executive Director, Miranda Gardiner

Miranda was a featured speaker at last September’s inaugural Data Center Frontier Trends Summit. The call for speakers is now open for this year’s event, which will be held again in Reston, Virginia from Aug. 26-28. DCF Show Podcast Quotes from Miranda Gardiner, Executive Director, iMasons Climate Accord On Her Career Journey and Early Passion for Sustainability:   – “My goals have always been kind of sustainability, affordable housing. I shared a story last week on a panel that my mother even found a yearbook of me from my elementary school years. The question that year was like, what do you hope for the future? And mine was there’d be no pollution and everyone would have a home.” On Transitioning to Data Centers:   – “We started to see this mission-critical focus in facilities like data centers, airports, and healthcare buildings. For me, connecting sustainability into the performance of the building made data centers the perfect match.” Overview of the iMasons Climate Accord:   – “The iMasons Climate Accord is an initiative started in 2022. The primary focus is emission reductions, and the only requirement to join is having an emission reduction strategy.”   – “This year, we refined our roadmap to include objectives such as having a climate strategy, incentivizing low-GHG materials like green concrete, and promoting equity by supporting small, women-owned, and minority-owned businesses.” On Industry Collaboration and Leadership:   – “This year, through the Climate Accord, we issued a call to action on the value of environmental product declarations (EPDs). It was signed by AWS, Digital Realty, Google, Microsoft, Schneider Electric, and Meta—talk about a big initiative and impact!” On EPDs and Carbon Disclosure:   – “EPDs provide third-party verification of materials coming into buildings. Pairing that with the Open Compute Project’s carbon disclosure labels on equipment creates vast opportunities for transparency and

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Accelsius and iM Data Centers Demo Next-Gen Cooling and Sustainability at Miami Data Center

Miami Data Center Developments Update Miami has recently witnessed several significant developments and investments in its data center sector, underscoring the city’s growing importance as a digital infrastructure hub. Notable projects include: Project Apollo:  A proposed 15-megawatt (MW), two-story, 75,000-square-foot data center in unincorporated Miami-Dade County. With an estimated investment of $150 million, construction is slated to commence between 2026 and 2027. The development team has prior experience with major companies such as Amazon, Meta, and Iron Mountain.  RadiusDC’s Acquisition of Miami I:  In August 2024, RadiusDC acquired the Miami I data center located in the Sweetwater area. Spanning 170,000 square feet across two stories, the facility currently offers 3.2MW of capacity, with plans to expand to 9.2 MW by the first half of 2026. The carrier-neutral facility provides connectivity to 11 fiber optic and network service providers.  Iron Mountain’s MIA-1 Data Center: Iron Mountain is developing a 150,000-square-foot, 16 MW data center on a 3.4-acre campus in Central North West Miami. The facility, known as MIA-1, is scheduled to open in 2026 and aims to serve enterprises, cloud providers, and large-scale users in South Florida. It will feature fiber connections to other Iron Mountain facilities and a robust pipeline of carriers and software-defined networks.  EDGNEX’s Investment Plans:  As of this month, Dubai, UAE-based EDGNEX has announced plans to invest $20 billion in the U.S. data center market, with the potential to double this investment. This plan includes a boutique condo project in Miami, estimated to have a $1 billion gross development value, indicating a significant commitment to the region’s digital infrastructure.  All of these developments highlight Miami’s strategic position as a connectivity hub, particularly serving as a gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean. The city’s data center market is characterized by steady growth, with a focus on retail colocation and

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Tract Capital Unveils Fleet Data Centers, Specializing In 500 MW+ Build-to-Suit Megacampuses

Tract Capital has announced the launch of Fleet Data Centers, a new platform dedicated to the development of mega-scale data center campuses with capacities of 500 MW or more, specifically designed for single-user customers.  The initiative is led by Grant van Rooyen, CEO of Tract Capital and Executive Chairman of Fleet Data Centers, and Chris Vonderhaar, the newly appointed President of Fleet Data Centers.  Vonderhaar brings extensive experience to the role, having served as Vice President of Demand and Supply Management at Google Cloud and as a senior leader at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for over a decade, where he oversaw the design, planning, construction, and operation of AWS’s global data center platform.  The Fleet leadership team also includes veterans from hyperscalers, wholesale data center providers, network infrastructure firms, and equipment vendors, with a collective track record of deploying dozens of gigawatts of data center capacity across hundreds of facilities globally. A Two Prong Strategy Defining two distinct strategies, Fleet is the mega-campus vertical development arm of Tract Capital, an alternative asset manager specializing in scaling digital infrastructure, which also operates Tract to refine development sites at ground level for data centers in terms of lining up power, fiber, zoning and entitlements.  Fleet Data Centers will aim to address the next phase of hyperscale data center growth by offering customized gigawatt-level campuses that provide predictability, flexibility, and scalability for hyperscalers navigating increasing infrastructure demands. This new venture from Tract Capital underscores the growing need for innovative, large-scale digital infrastructure solutions, particularly as hyperscalers face mounting challenges in scaling their global platforms to meet the demands of the digital age. The unveiling of Fleet is just another example of the way Tract Capital has consistently demonstrated its expertise in accelerating the scaling of responsible technology infrastructure, combining operational capabilities from industry

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Call for Speakers: Second Annual Data Center Frontier Trends Summit, Aug. 26-28, Reston, VA

Data Center Frontier (DCF) is excited to announce the Call for Speakers for our highly anticipated second annual Data Center Frontier Trends Summit, set to take place from August 26-28, 2025 in Reston, Virginia.  This premier industry event will once again bring together the brightest minds and leaders in the data center and digital infrastructure sectors to explore cutting-edge trends shaping the future of the industry.   Submit Speaking Proposals Here The DCF Trends Summit focuses on delivering deep insights and actionable knowledge for professionals navigating the evolving challenges and opportunities in data center innovation, energy efficiency, sustainability, and advanced technology integration. This year’s event will feature keynote speakers, expert panels, and interactive discussions on topics such as AI workloads, modular and edge computing, renewable energy strategies, and the global expansion of hyperscale facilities.   Call for Papers Details The DCF Trends Summit welcomes paper submissions on a wide range of relevant topics, including but not limited to: Emerging Trends:  AI, machine learning, and edge computing in data center operations. Power: Utility and substation power, renewables and behind-the-meter onsite, battery backup, energy storage. Sustainability:  Innovations in energy efficiency, renewable energy integration, and sustainable design. Technology Innovations:  Next-gen cooling systems, advanced automation, and breakthroughs in network infrastructure. National & Global Perspectives:  Regional market dynamics for site selection and regulation plus strategies for addressing evolving customer needs and workforce development.   View the Full DCF Trends ‘Topics of Interest’ Listing Industry professionals, researchers, and thought leaders are encouraged to submit papers that reflect their expertise, insights, and forward-looking perspectives. Submissions should align with the core themes of the Summit and provide actionable takeaways for attendees.   The deadline for paper submissions is January 29, 2025. All speakers will receive complimentary registration and the opportunity to share their work with a diverse audience

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UAE company to invest $20B in U.S. AI data centers

A United Arab Emirates investment firm has pledged $20 billion to build new data centers targeting AI across a number of locations across the United States. Billionaire Hussain Sajwani, CEO and founder of the property development company DAMAC Properties in Dubai, made the announcement at president-elect Donald Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. Sajwani is a close friend of Trump, according to news reports. Trump said the first phase of the planned investment will take place in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. And that’s just for starters. “They may go double, or even somewhat more than double, that amount of money,” Trump said of the deal.

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).  In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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