Case Study: Woodside Energy achieves AUD 10M savings and 75% faster access to 30 years of engineering knowledge with IBM Watson

Using IBM Watson technology to extract decades of experience from an ocean of data

Woodside Energy faced the challenge of unlocking three decades of engineering and drilling knowledge that was trapped in unstructured documents and in the heads of senior staff. To solve this, Woodside engaged IBM, using IBM Watson technology (including IBM Watson Assistant, IBM Watson Discovery and the Natural Language Classifier) and IBM Cloud services to create a cognitive system tailored to oil & gas projects.

IBM ingested roughly 30 years / ~33,000 technical documents, built Watson for Projects and Watson for Drilling instances, and trained the system with Woodside engineers so it understands industry sublanguages. The IBM solution delivered a 75% reduction in time spent finding information, enabled AUD 10M in employee cost savings, shifted engineers’ effort toward insight generation (from 20% to about 80%), and has been scaled across multiple business areas.

Woodside Energy

Peter Coleman

Chief Executive Officer