Sto­ries by Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

As more ad­vanced tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­ues to be in­te­grat­ed in­to dif­fer­ent sec­tors, se­nior of­fi­cials from dif­fer­ent en­er­gy com­pa­nies main­tain that the judg­ment and de­ci­sion-mak­ing should be left to hu­man staff.

The dis­cus­sion was one of sev­er­al top­ics raised dur­ing the ques­tion and an­swer seg­ment of a pan­el dis­cus­sion dur­ing the 2024 T&T En­er­gy Con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency con­fer­ence cen­tre yes­ter­day af­ter­noon.

The theme of this year’s con­fer­ence is Ac­cel­er­at­ing Ac­tion.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions from an at­tendee on da­ta man­age­ment us­ing a mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion, chief op­er­a­tions of­fi­cer for At­lantic LNG Jean An­dre Ce­lestain said hav­ing hu­mans as the main op­er­a­tors be­hind such sys­tems was crit­i­cal.

He added that ac­cess to da­ta is nec­es­sary for the op­er­a­tion of fa­cil­i­ties and it is crit­i­cal to en­sur­ing faster, more ef­fi­cient re­spons­es. Ce­lestain not­ed that dis­or­gan­ised or in­ac­ces­si­ble da­ta could take longer.

“At the end of the day, we want hu­mans to make de­ci­sions, to lever­age their ex­pe­ri­ence, knowl­edge and ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

“Of course, AI may one day come and help us in that space but the first part about it is or­gan­is­ing the da­ta and mak­ing the da­ta read­i­ly avail­able be­cause many times our peo­ple spend hours and hours look­ing for the da­ta and when they get it, it takes five min­utes to make a de­ci­sion.

“So if our da­ta is or­gan­ised, first of all we need to ask what do we have? Is it or­gan­ised in an ef­fec­tive, con­sis­tent way and is it eas­i­ly ac­ces­si­ble?”

Ce­lestain said hav­ing da­ta that is easy to ac­cess would be a di­rect step to­wards achiev­ing the theme of the con­fer­ence of ac­cel­er­at­ing the re­spons­es of com­pa­nies.

Al­so re­spond­ing to the ques­tion was CEO of Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um, Erik Kesku­la, who said while da­ta could al­low ad­min­is­tra­tors to make more in­formed de­ci­sions, hu­man ex­per­tise and skill made the dif­fer­ence.

“Just be­cause you have da­ta, da­ta’s not enough. Da­ta has to dri­ve you to in­sight and it’s that bal­ance of bring­ing that da­ta in, us­ing that hu­man mind that we have to un­der­stand it and the tools we now have through ma­chine learn­ing and Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence to help in­ter­pret that da­ta. But don’t get in­to analy­sis paral­y­sis where we can’t meet the theme of this con­fer­ence to ac­cel­er­ate ca­pa­bil­i­ties.”