Worley targets a 10x return on its AI investments

ASX-listed engineering firm Worley is becoming a “convenor” of digital technology for its energy, chemical and resource industry customers, changing the way capital projects are planned and executed.

Worley's Anup Sharma

At a strategy day, Worley’s executive group director of digital Anup Sharma said the way that capital projects are approached has “fundamentally not changed … for the last 40 years”.

“Now, we have a real opportunity to reimagine what this end to end value execution looks like - how do we deliver from pre-FEED [front-end engineering design] to decommissioning.”

“Chris [Ashton, CEO] often says we’re in the predictability of outcomes business.

“I’m happy to report that we’re driving groundbreaking solutions which give us value across the customer value chain.”

AI and data analytics will play a major role in helping Worley to advance this goal.

The firm was revealed in March to be a user of the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, although it wasn’t clear at the time just how deeply that technology partnership runs.

Sharma said the partnership and collaboration with Nvidia is “exclusive” and that Nvidia chief Jensen Huang has personally taken an interest in the industrial and engineering spaces that Worley works in.

“Frankly, Jensen himself has taken a personal interest in driving solutions in our space, and this allows us to have unparalleled access to product and engineering talent within Nvidia,” Sharma said.

“This is a game-changer for us. 

“The Dell Nvidia AI factory allows us to create a blueprint that is repeatable for our customers.”

Sharma outlined multiple goals for Worley’s digital investments, including to “reimagine speed to value while we assure project delivery”.

The company is hoping to use its “50-plus years of domain expertise, the knowledge and skills of its workforce, and about 12 petabytes of “context and data” - to train AI models and to underpin digital simulations of physical environments.

Sharma said that for AI-based solutions alone, Worley is looking for “a 10x return” on investment.

It isn’t just the Dell-Nvidia partnership that the company is relying on.

It is also partnered with C3 AI and is “co-innovating” with them around “reduction of project risk, the reliability and safety improvement in assets, and the complex network of assets, and [on] how we improve execution timelines for our customer.”

In addition, Microsoft remains a long-term strategic partner, with current efforts focused on cyber security” and on the vendor’s “extensible data fabric”.

In totality, Sharma said Worley’s efforts would help its industrial customers with their large-scale assets and projects.

“Our customers are really focused on improving capital efficiency, and in the near term a reduction of cost of what it takes to deliver projects,” he said.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in the supply chain. We have tools that have been battle-tested in high tech, in healthcare and in other sectors that are adjacent to us. We’re able to lift-and-shift that capability and build it for our customers.

“Our customers are also very focused on bringing [in] a partnership ecosystem. They view Worley as a convenor of ecosystem solution ready capabilities.”