The people and AI that fuel Repsol’s digitalization

Madrid-based Repsol, a repeat finalist at the 2024 CIO 100 Awards in Spain, has been immersed for years in a process of digital transformation with the aim to become more multi-energy focused, more customer oriented, and better committed to digitalization, innovation, and talent management.

It’s all spelled out in its updated strategic plan for the period from 2023 to 2027, which also ratifies the organization’s pledge to energy transition and decarbonization, reinforcing how digital is an essential enabler to successfully achieve these objectives. 

In 2018, the company launched the first four-year wave of its digital program, serving as a cross-organizational initiative supported by senior management, and its success has been based on the business being a check against its transformation. The company extended the program with a second digital wave to continue promoting and reinforcing digitalization based on seven fundamental values: greater security and reliability in operations, intelligent planning and programming, excellence in digitalized operations, development of digitally optimized assets, omnichannel and data-driven customer experience, innovation in new business models, and agile organization. 

Repsol’s current digital program has more than 670 digital cases underway, of which 400 have been supported by AI and 34% are in mature operation. Of these, 60% focus directly on cases, and indirectly on others to support the company’s decarbonization objectives. 

A sure bet on gen AI

Since 2018, the company put a lot of focus on data and AI, and scaled it throughout the organization with the ambition to become more data-driven. Now in the next digital wave, and with the emergence of gen AI, Repsol is aware this technology represents a turning point in productivity, which is why it became an early adopter.

As a result, the Generative AI Competence Center was born in June 2023, in collaboration with Microsoft. This project, a finalist in the CIO 100 Awards in the Data Management and AI category, is a pioneer in the European energy sector, and helps the company consolidate its position in the use of AI and data, as well as explore possibilities offered by the technology.

The center is deployed in several lines of work. The first, the laboratory for new ways of working, has the objective of promoting new and more beneficial working methods. “We’ve extended generative AI at Repsol with Microsoft Copilot, resulting in time savings, improved quality, and an increase in employee dedication to tasks with higher added value,” says María Ángeles Arroyo, head of Repsol’s Generative AI Competence Center.

Another line of work is the digital case factory to identify and implement cases in which the use of gen AI models generates business value. Currently, more than 55 initiatives have been launched and developed that use gen AI across the business. For example, SafePlay automatically generates informative material on security based on a history of incidents. Or Harvey, which analyzes legal documents or compares contracts and standards. 

Then there’s the generative code development lab, whose objective is to accelerate the software development process, improve its quality, and increase productivity. “We’ve evaluated how GitHub Copilot can help developers generate code, with more than 1.1 million lines of code in 20 different programming languages,” says Arroyo.

Finally, there’s the responsible AI group, and since the first stage of the digital program, mechanisms have been established to ensure responsible and safe AI models. “In the second digital wave, we’ve collaborated with other organizations by forming working groups to promote joint reports that ensure responsible AI,” Arroyo adds. “In addition, we set guiding principles in line with the European AI Act, and defined the governance model so AI is used legally, responsibly, and in an agile manner.”  

Adding layers for better performance

After a year of work, in addition to the lines already launched, the company created additional ones including systemized gen AI plans for each business unit; the Business and Productivity Impact Office to identify, measure, and monitor the impact generated by gen AI; structured training to facilitate the successful adoption of gen AI; and human-centered AI to define the interaction between users and applications. 

The Generative AI Competence Center has also had a major impact on professionals and the corporate culture. Within the framework of new ways of working, the Copilot M365 pilot project has been carried out to help evaluate the impact of the gen AI tool, alongside active change management. The experiment lasted four months and resulted in an average time saving of 121 minutes per week, per person on routine tasks, which represents over 96 hours per year per employee.

In addition, the quality of deliverables increased by 16%, standing out in originality and critical thinking. The employee experience also benefited with about 62% of users saying they wouldn’t want to work without Copilot, valuing its impact on productivity and motivation.

The new role of the CIO

Juan Manuel García, Repsol’s CIO and CDO, has been leading the company’s digital program since 2022, and now that it’s immersed in its second wave, he’s giving fundamental importance to AI and gen AI. Digitalization is one of the company’s key levers to accelerate energy transition, and he’s led the creation of the AI ​​Competence Center because he believes this technology will increase company productivity. 

A highlight of García’s leadership, which earned him a spot as a 2024 finalist in the CIO 100 Awards for CIO of the Year, is his vision and approach to how to achieve complete digital transformation in an organization. Success has been based on involving all business areas, with each leading its own digitalization. So the IT team, made up of 800 people and led by him, has become a key enabler of this pursuit, since it has the functional and technical knowledge to understand the needs of the business, and bring the technology and digital skills to the people so they can adopt it. In this process, people have always been at the center as the main drivers of improvement.