← Oil and Gas Upstream
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Oil and gas production is the union of natural systems with advanced science and complex engineering. Smart people across the globe create this remarkable place we call Upstream. And each day brings a new challenge. This is the Oil and Gas Upstream podcast where we look at how these systems come together and learn from the people who make it happen.
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Welcome to Oil and Gas Upstream. I'm Elena Milgert, your host. Some of you know me as the former Director for Oil and Gas Upstream Research at the US Department of Energy. I retired from the doe, founded Energia Consulting, and became a podcast host. And we welcome our new sponsor, ifs. Through one comprehensive platform, IFS supports the unique needs of the oil and gas industry, resulting in streamlined workflows, automated business processes, and lowering operating expenses through improved efficiency, all of which can help you maximize asset performance. Learn more@ifs.com and now I'd like to introduce today's guest, Ted Pardee, Chief Revenue Officer for Cognitive Spark, bringing augmented reality and artificial intelligence to frontline industrial workers. Hi, Ted. Thanks for joining us today.
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A
Thank you so much, Elaine. It's great to be here.
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B
I'm going to read just a little bit an overview of your experience. You are a sales, marketing and operations professional with over 20 years of leadership and management success. You're experienced in senior leadership roles for cloud solutions, IT services, managed services, SaaS, and DaaS. Is that what we say?
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A
There you go.
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B
And traditional software deployments. This is so exciting. This is not an area that I'm strong in, so I'm really looking forward to you sharing all about it. Tell us about your background, a little bit more detail, and then about your company, Cognitive Spark, and then we'll get into the augmented reality and all of that good stuff. So tell us a little bit more about your background. Yeah.
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A
Being a native Houstonian, I live in Houston, Texas. I've always been the outlier in the city because I've always been in the software and the technology business, starting back in software way back in 1992. And I started in the software industry before the Internet was around. But I'm going to be probably one of the older interviews you've had here, for sure.
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Not counting me.
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Well, technology has been such an important part of the oil and gas industry and whether you're upstream, midstream, downstream. Technology is becoming more and more important in our lives, creating efficiencies, finding ways to extract more with less. Right. And so I've really had the privilege of working for some fantastic emerging technology companies. I made a decision early in my career to venture off of working for the really big software guys like Oracle and those guys and work with small independent software companies that might have venture capital backing and companies that can really make an impact and help our industry, help the energy industry in general become more efficient.
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B
Yeah, yeah. No, that's exciting. That was in 1992. Started getting involved and I remember all of that time and it took a while before I actually got a workstation. So it was like a long time. But that's a long ways from augmented reality.
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Boy, it really is. Yeah.
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B
Yeah.
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So I think the world that we live in has changed so much. I remember when this type of thing with all of our things on it. I remember when it was just a dream, when it was Star Trek, to be honest with you. The Star Trek communicator.
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B
That's right. That was the thing we all wanted to have. And then they had a little thing like a tablet and all that great technology.
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A
That's right. And today it's just a normal part of our lives and it's where the consumer industry has really merged with big industry. I think we had this transition period where BlackBerry technology was utilized by a lot of companies and that was primarily a trusted corporate tool security wise and things like that. But once the iPhone came into existence and some emerging technologies were embraced by the consumer market, what you saw was industry decided to adopt it. And I think we're living through that right now with AI. And what's also going to be shoulder to shoulder with AI over the next 25 to 30 years is augmented reality as well, where you have a lot of folks who play video games at home and they're using virtual reality VR glasses while augmented reality is the exact same thing. The only difference is that the augmented reality glasses have a clear lens so you can actually work with a headset on. You can see images on the inside of the glass, yet you can still see through the glass. It's exciting to be a part of that technology today.
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B
Oh my gosh. So that's why it's augmented, because you're actually doing what you would normally do because you can see what you're doing. So what you get extra help you get. What's the non reality stuff?
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You know what the use case, what you're talking about is really how do you use that in business today? I think there's really two big things that are hitting especially our industry. When I speak of our industry, I talk about the energy space broadly, but oil and gas, specifically upstream. Right now there's the gray tsunami as many people are Calling it right. It's really the great crew change. What you're seeing is folks that are gray haired are starting to think about retirement. They're thinking about getting out of the workforce. And then you have an engineering sort of deficit where through the past 25 years, the number of engineers that have decided to get into the energy space has been really minimal compared to engineers. An engineer might, a young person might go to Texas A and M and get a degree in engineering and then they'll leave and go to Washington state to go work for Amazon. I have a friend whose son is. That was his decision. It's sad to see that talent leave the state and leave the industry. But again, this is the natural evolution of things. So the technology can help you retain workers. It will allow younger workers to put on a headset, which they're very comfortable with because many of the younger workers have really grown up with gaming and using VR technology. And what you can do is just as we're sitting on a call today, a remote call. I could participate as a senior leader in a remote call out at a remote location like a pump jack. Or if you have a landman who might be looking at land or looking at an old, you can use it in production where you could have roustabouts who are using the technology on location because they do have C1, D2, C1, D1 type headsets with hard hats and secure so that you can be in an intrinsically safe environment. So again, back to the cell phone analogy. Thirty years ago, I would have never imagined that my schedule, my calendar, my map of how I need to get somewhere, my alarm clock would all be contained in a single device. And it is today. If we can think ahead 20 years, you can leverage the technology to train younger workers and to make it easier for them to get up to speed. And you're retaining the older workers that don't want to travel 250 days a year, the ones that want to stay in their office or their home office, you can keep them engaged in the workforce and allow for that knowledge transfer.
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B
Yeah, yeah. I like the training aspect because there is no substitute for that experience. You can't get the experience until you're thoroughly and completely trained. There is that transition from having the book knowledge or the classroom knowledge, but then the first time you are actually on a rig handling something tricky, something you really have to be heads up about, something you really haven't handled before because anything can happen in a moment. We have a lot of safety protocols, but still engineering is trying to intersect natural systems and we can't always control nature the way we would like to. Is that a sweet spot perhaps for the augmented reality when you can use your training, but you can also get a little bit of help, for example, if you're drilling or if you're just putting pipe together. That's messy. Nevermind. That probably wouldn't be the one, but maybe in a frac job or something.
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Yeah, it's a real world use case that we have seen our customers embrace. What is not uncommon is to have a couple of headsets in pickup trucks as an example, or they'll have them out at a site location when there's a challenging situation. Or hey, we need to run this by the boss. People will pull out their cell phone and they'll take videos or they'll talk, they'll do a FaceTime or they'll call somebody to find out what's going on. If you have an augmented reality glass on your, if you're wearing them and they look a lot like just regular glasses with a camera in the corner, all you have to do is tap the side of it and you can begin a call, you can do a video call back to teams to bring in a couple of experts like you and me. And then we can see on our screen we can see everything that they see in high definition and then we can talk to them because they also have a speaker in the side of the glass so that you can just have a normal conversation with them. Even the noise is loud. And we operate these in a lot of industrial environments. We work in chemical world and in refining as well. But it gives those experts an opportunity to coach the newer or younger engineers through or the folks out at the site. Again, roster roustabouts can use these to solve quick problems. And whereas in the past you had to get on the phone, you had to have somebody drive out there. If you're working in Monahan's, Texas, or you're working out somewhere in the Eagle Ford Shale, you're in real, a real remote area and it's not. You can't be there in 15 minutes. Right. So the headset gives you a way to give them a real time experience. Again, 4K cameras on the. There's usually three or four cameras on the headsets so you get a holistic view of what they're looking at and you can help solve problems more quickly.
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And that time is money there if you have to stop because you need some coaching. And of course it's better to ask than it is to make A really expensive mistake, those kinds of things. Working in the field is a different experience of working in the office. And sometimes all that equipment that you have just gets in the way, if you will. It's not fun to wear or whatever, but give us an experience, a word experience for how someone would actually feel and engage in using the equipment. Because it sounds fine when you're in your living room or whatever with your friends. It's probably different when you're working the
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way that individuals will use it. You can personalize the device, you can wear it like glasses, but the way that most of our customers in the oil field like to use it. There's an attachment for the glass to attach to a hard hat. They're going to put their hard hat on no matter what. And it will flip the glasses up like this. You can flip the glasses down. It doesn't even have to touch your nose. So you can wear safety glasses underneath them. You have. It's very easy to use. And then just to start a call, there's either a button, depending on the hardware. There's 500 different hardware manufacturers these days. But depending on the hardware, you either touch the side or you click the button and you can immediately start a live teams call or a live interaction just like we're having right now. We see this throughout the landscape of the energy industry. We have customers, as I mentioned, that are downstream using it in chemical plants around the Houston area. We have pipeline companies. So we have one of the major pipeline companies in, in North America uses us to monitor and inspect all of their pipelines from coast to coast. So you can imagine the footprint. And there's only a couple of companies that have that. I don't want to disclose their name, but you can imagine the size and the scale of the maintenance of those pipelines. This is an example of where you can get that real world interaction, real time, so you don't have to wait. The exciting thing is where AI starts to come in right now. The headsets can connect to a WI FI hotspot or to a starlink. A lot of companies are putting starlinks on each pickup truck so that they have immediate Internet access. But Elena, there is the occasional time where you run into a situation where you may not have connectivity. This is where AI is going to change the game, where AI the AI will actually record any whatever you're working on. And it can be done with an expert on the call or without an expert on the call. When you have an expert on the call and you record that repair or that maintenance that's happening or solving that problem. AI can take that hour long conversation and transcribe it into a five minute type YouTube clip. And we have partners that we work with, one we met with today called panopto, where panopto is designing a repository that can go into your network and find videos and it will create your sort of own internal corporate YouTube so that you don't have to go look for files so you can have an engineer who might be out on the field. The headsets are essentially like our phones. They have memory, they're like, it's like a laptop on your, on your head so you can download videos. You can say, I'm going to be repairing these type of things if you can just send me all the videos, put it into the headset. That way if I lose the Internet connection, because they do have WI fi connectivity or cellular connectivity, the glasses do. If you lose the connection, then you can just do an AI prompt. You can say, show me all of the Siemens pumps that might work in this type of situation and it will give you all the videos that you have that you've retained there inside the lens. And then you can just select the one and look at the instructional video of how to repair it. And if you also think about the younger generation, they're used to going to YouTube to learn how to do things. I always joke that when, when I was putting together my children's furniture as a young father, I would break out the piece of the paper and you'd go through the 40 pages of how to put it together. My sons, who are now young adults, they don't waste their time with the instructions. They just go to YouTube to figure out how to solve, how to do it. And then this technology can allow you to do the exact same thing for the workforce.
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B
Oh my gosh, that's great. That's great. Okay, so that is being out in the field. And I want to say rough terrain. It's not an office setting. Are there setting applications that interface with the workers who interface with the field teams as well as. But I'm not saying peer office, I'm just saying that interface there. Is that an application?
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There is. And it looks a lot like teams or like zoom. The way that the system is designed, it allows the person who's sitting in the office to actually take control of the camera on the individual that's out in the field. So they could be 5,000 miles away. And as an engineer sitting in Houston, Texas, I can be looking at what they're looking at and then I can take control of the camera, I can start and stop video, I can start and I can take pictures. And then I can back in my office in Houston, I can annotate those pictures, I can add additional content and text to it. And then I can send it to the headset so that it appears as like a text message in the headset that they can then open and then look at the annotation that I've immediately done. I can circle the pump and I can say, here's your broken actuator, you need to repair this. I know you've never done it before, so let's talk through it. And then I can send it to their headset so they see it immediately. So the power is in the headset. It's the software really that's running underneath all of it that makes it so effective because the software connects to the back office.
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Okay. So you really are having human to human interaction even though it's digital. But sometimes you need that, sometimes you need it.
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And we work across many industries. We work in the defense industry as well. So we work with the US Military, the UK military and Canadian military. And they use it for repairing vehicles, for doing remote repairs in really difficult locations that are really difficult to reach, a lot like our oil and gas customers do. And yet what they're really focused on is solving problems quickly. Right. So you'll have somebody that might be at a base somewhere or even though they may need to talk to the oem, the original equipment manufacturer. So they may need to. You might be in the Ukraine and you have a certain vehicle that breaks down, you can make a phone call back to Fort Worth, where Bell Helicopter is or someone like that. They can immediately get on a teams call just like this, and they can provide the guidance and advice that you need in order to solve that problem quickly.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Wow. And I guess for safety situations, I'm talking about accidents or just emergency situations or whatever, having those kinds of eyes. And oil fields are remote, so you might not be able to get someone there. But maybe you can provide extra help by teaching something, I don't know.
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As a part of your safety procedures, everybody has to go through safety training. Another use case that one of our customers that's in the power gen business, one of the examples that they give is they bring some of our team members on site once a year in order to make sure that everybody is certified on how to use this. And so they go through a full safety training exercise, not even using it for the actual use case, but a full two day safety training session where they can triage any medical emergencies or issues that come up. And it's really cool to see that use case come into existence because obviously if you're with a bunch of remote workers way out in the middle of nowhere and you have a medical emergency, time is always of the essence. And by leveraging an augmented reality headset, you have immediate access back to the expert that you need to talk to, or doctor, or could be calling in an ambulance, an air ambulance or something like that. Right. All of those scenarios have actually been experienced using our technology. And it's really heartwarming and exciting to see the technology of the different ways that it can be used.
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Yeah, I'm sure there's other use cases as well, and I'm interested in those, but I didn't want to have our time go by without you telling us about your company, Cognitive Spark.
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Cognitive Spark is really what I would consider a young startup software company. Cognitive Spark started back in 2017, been around for a little bit, been through the tough days of COVID and experiencing that. Right. And survived. The exciting thing though, is that this technology was so new back then and it's really new today. To be totally honest with you, it's still very early in the adoption curve if you think about when business will adopt new things. So this is really early on. Microsoft was actually the first company that came out with an augmented reality headset. It was called the HL one, the HoloLens one. They had some success with it. They sold it with their team's product and gave it, gave you some free licenses, things like that, to try to get people to use it. Many companies made that investment. They came out with a Hololens 2, but unfortunately they decided to get out of the hardware business. So they made an announcement about a year and a half ago that they were going to stop making this, the hardware. But that kind of unlocked or opened the door to a whole wave of new companies to come into existence who are creating these headsets. And today, as I mentioned, there are no less than 50 really good headsets that we work with. But there are other headsets that are coming that are just unbelievable, the technology that they're able to leverage. And it's all about what they call the wave guide, which is the screen that's on the inside, the transparent screen that's on the inside of the glasses. Even though it sits this close to your eye, it looks as if it's off in the distance. It makes it very. It's a very clear image and it's very easy to see. So our software engineers identified that this is something really that's going to change the way businesses work and that they wanted to be on the leading edge of it. So we became the first certified Microsoft HoloLens partner to work with them on the software side. And then we've transitioned now and we work with many other companies that make headset devices for us. We tell companies all the time there's a lot of great headsets out there. We could recommend a couple if you're interested. But many companies have some headsets already in stock. A lot of IT departments made the investment a few years ago. Whether you have a realwear headset or you have a Digilens headset, whatever the headset might be, odds are that we've worked with it and we've had success using it. So that's our little software company. We've, as I said, we've been around for a little while, one of the real early adopters of the technology, of this augmented reality technology. And we're excited to see where it's going to take the world.
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B
And you're in Houston and other places.
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We are. So we have a US team, we're all based in Houston, but the company is actually based in Canada. So we have engineering team up in Canada that develops all the technology, have some sales team members up there as well. And then we have an office over in the UK as well. As we mentioned, we do some business with the UK Ministry of Defense, but we also do a lot of business with private industry in Europe as well. So it's really a neat technology and it's fun to be a part of.
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And how would someone get involved in it, someone who's not there? We definitely still have a lot of gray haired people who are in charge and the like. And how would someone begin to approach that who didn't grow up with it? Number one, can see the value of it. Is it all or nothing? Can you wade in easily or what does that look like?
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Yeah, you can. I think it's important for companies to try things. Many companies have, they'll have an emerging technology department or they'll have. Many of the energy companies actually have augmented reality teams that are looking at new technology, looking at new software. And again, our approach is our software works on any platform. So whatever your platform of choice might be, we work with it. But if you're interested, check us out on LinkedIn is probably the best way to go or to go to our Website. We're Cognitive K O G N I t I v spark cognitivespark.com and we have a great customer base. We've got some fantastic customers that have been with us since 2016 and we look forward to expanding and growing more in the US and especially in my hometown of Houston.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Cognitive is a K. And there's no E at the end.
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There's no E at the end.
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B
I ran into that quite a few times. I've been to your website. It's just so fun to see all of this great new technology. The way that you approach your work is entirely different. I would say that experience and it's very interesting, very glamorous almost. It was just pretty exciting, this new technology.
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And for companies like us, if we can't solve a problem for the company, if we can't help them be more efficient, then, you know, we're not going to. Then we don't have a real business. So we very much focus on helping companies solve problems.
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B
We are almost out of time, but I did want to give you one more chance to say anything about the technology or the experience that I didn't get to give you a chance to say before. This is very exciting and one of the things I'm wondering about, I hope we can't see into the subsurface. We can't be down there, but there are different kinds of and better technologies, cameras that show you the actual orientation of things. Is that something that is on the horizon? Perhaps because we really can't see what a fracture looks like and we'd like to and it'd be. Have to be very tiny and oil feel hardy. But if you look into the future very far, could I be wearing some sort of a headset in my office and really see what's down there, the bitface.
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It's hard to predict what the new technology, what can be adopted. I think it's up to whatever we can dream is what can happen. I know that if you think about something like understanding the contents of a core sample. Right. So if you're going to pull out a core sample, I've worked, I've been out in situations where a senior guy would recognize immediately with the mud as it's coming through and, and understanding what they're looking at. But the younger team members obviously don't have that same expertise.
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B
So it takes a while.
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Yeah, it takes a while. But as you train team members, you can use the technology for training. You can show them other examples that are similar. And I think that what you're going to see more of is the AI will help solve the problem before it becomes a problem. I think that's the most important thing is it's not there to take away jobs. And the way that I really approach this is I want the workers to be empowered to really be even more efficient and to do to have more tools at their disposal. We didn't design it to work on a robot, we designed it to work right. And we designed the software to work between two humans. To me, that's again, what gets me excited about the future, is what this can do for the workforce of the future and the ways that it can help companies be more efficient and keep safety at the top of everybody's mind. Right. Which is the most important thing in those situations is making sure your workers are safe. And what better way to do that than to have full video capability, full audio capability to see what's happening in real time. So I'm excited about what technology. I've always been in the emerging tech space and this is definitely an exciting one.
- [25:20]
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I'm late to show up to the tech space if you will, but I just love the capabilities because I still think that the human brain is the most effective problem solver and computer that we can possibly have. And if we can get rid of some of the stuff that needs memory and just do the fun stuff, we could really unlock lots of. We can solve a lot more problems than we currently do. Oh, this is so much fun talking with you, Ted. This is Ted Pardee, Chief Revenue Officer, Cognitive without an E Cognitive Spark. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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Thank you, Elena, it's been my pleasure.
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Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone for listening. This is Alaina Melker, your host for Oil and Gas Upstream. More next time.
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Thanks for listening to oggn, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.