Held on 6 March with AI as its theme, the meeting attracted representatives from government, academia and various industries to learn how innovation and new technology can improve safety and the working environment while boosting value creation and helping to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“Our aim is a high level of safety and a good working environment not only in the petroleum sector but also in renewable energy generation and carbon transport and storage,” Carlsen said in his presentation. “To succeed with this ambition, innovation and technological progress will be crucial.
“The industry, and the petroleum sector in particular, has worked for many years in a very good way on identifying and understanding risk. New technology like AI now represents new challenges, making it important to comprehend the risks and to pursue prudent solutions.
“We have a clear expectation that players in the petroleum sector and the emerging ocean industries follow up ongoing developments with AI. They must grasp the risk picture and what it means for the solutions they adopt.”
He added that those responsible for using AI also need to understand what its prudent application involves, and highlighted the Norwegian collaboration model as a key element in this work.
“Collaboration between companies and employees on finding good solutions and grasping their consequences is crucial for success in making prudent use of AI,” Carlsen said.
Both resource and risk
Linn Iren Vestly Bergh, who heads Havtil’s follow-up of the industry’s work on AI, presented development trends identified by the authority and which factors are important for monitoring complex AI systems.
She again emphasised that prudent application of AI assumes that the responsible party understands, has an overview of and actively follows up the risk of developing and using this technology.
“The question in the future will be less about whether we’re going to adopt it and more about how we do this in a prudent way,” she said. “AI can be a resource for the industry and help to reduce risk through better decision support and by reducing physically and mentally demanding tasks. But that simultaneously presents some challenges which it’s important to be informed about.”
Regulation
Havtil is following national and international approaches to regulating AI, and its initial assessment is that Norway’s technologically-neutral and performance based HSE rules are adequate. But it is also important that the standards referenced by the regulations are further developed on the basis of requirements related to the introduction and application of AI.
See videos of all the presentations at the Innovation Day seminar (in Norwegian only, except for Rialda Spahic)