Developing an Appetite for AI: ExxonMobil’s Sarah Karthigan

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:02)
And all you can eat sushi waffa and artificial intelligence.
How are they related? Find out today when we talk with Sarah Karthigan of ExxonMobil.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:13)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:34)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. And together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching AI for five years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:03)
Today, we're talking with Sarah Karthigan.
She's artificial intelligence for our IT operations manager at ExxonMobil. Sarah, thanks for joining us. Welcome.

**Sarah Karthigan** (1:11)
Thanks for having me.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:13)
ExxonMobil is one of the world's largest oil and gas companies, and it's existed since the 1870s, long before artificial intelligence. Sarah, can you tell us about your current role at ExxonMobil?

**Sarah Karthigan** (1:23)
I am currently responsible for leading the design and execution of self-healing strategies for IT operations using artificial intelligence. And self-healing at its core is proactively monitoring, detecting, and remediating issues without human intervention.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:42)
How did you end up in that role?

**Sarah Karthigan** (1:44)
My background is in electrical engineering. I started at ExxonMobil as a technical lead. I then went down the management career path. But one of my jobs took me up to Clinton, New Jersey, to support the corporate strategic research function. So it is there I got exposed to data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. I was part of several pilots where we were assessing artificial intelligence capabilities.
This inspired me to go back to school, and I pursued my graduate certification at Harvard in data science, and one thing led to another, and I came back to Houston to take on my data science manager role.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:31)
Maybe let's start with an example of a project that, maybe self-healing, maybe one of these projects. What is an example of a concrete way that you and your team have used artificial intelligence in a way that you couldn't have done before artificial intelligence?

**Sarah Karthigan** (2:47)
There are plenty of opportunities for artificial intelligence in the energy sector. But before I actually give you some examples, I think it's worthwhile to just understand the scale of operations in the energy sector, right? So kind of starting with the basics here. Energy is constantly evolving.
And when you think about energy, it underpins every area of modern life, right? So when you think about mobility, or economic prosperity, or social progress, access to energy underpins all of that.
And at its core, what we do here at ExxonMobil is ensuring that we are able to offer reliable, affordable energy to the masses. So the scale of energy itself is quite unimaginable. And the data that we work with is also massive. Big data is not new to the energy sector. So we deal with just huge volumes of data. So without artificial intelligence, without data science, or without machine learning, you can imagine the amount of effort that goes into just processing and analyzing that data. And with artificial intelligence, it is such a big, big, big advantage, the potential that AI carries with respect to just overall improving efficiency and cost effectiveness is huge.
We also use artificial intelligence for areas where we are able to automate manual tasks, thereby improving safety and productivity. And if we are able to get people off of harm's way, that's a huge application for artificial intelligence in the energy sector.

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**Sarah Karthigan** (5:03)
Additionally, ExxonMobil is an energy company, but at its core, again, we are a technology company. And so we can use AI to help our scientists and engineers in their decision making process. So we are able to augment their decision making, connect the dots, and help discover insights of value to them at a much faster pace. So there are plenty of applications. My team and I, we have worked on several use cases. And again, when you think about big data, clearly you can think of potential applications of deep learning when it comes to image processing. Now, whether that's in the front end of the value chain, you can start with seismic image processing to even leak and flare detection. So we can use artificial intelligence for just, again, plenty of use cases.