How one evangelist CEO has organized his teams to deploy AI in three waves

Few public-company CEOs preaching about how their teams are using artificial intelligence to upgrade the work they’re doing can top Clay Gaspar when it comes to enthusiasm and candor. The boss of Devon Energy Corp., which last year generated revenues of more than $17 billion from its oil-and-gas operations that reach from South Texas to North Dakota, is an eager evangelist for how AI is saving Devon time, making its operations more efficient and adding to its bottom line.

Speaking earlier this month at the Goldman Sachs Energy, CleanTech & Utilities Conference, Gaspar talked about how the Devon organization has focused on sustainably growing its free cash flow as “the mountain” that it needs to take to win over time. Technological tools are key to doing that, he said, and are powering 80 projects around the company.

“I can tell you: Every single one of those is enabled by AI one way or another,” Gaspar said.

If you’re still trying to wrap your arms around deploying AI, you could do a lot worse than the high-level framework Gaspar has set up for Devon. Here’s how he described it at the Goldman gathering:

“Internally, we talk about these three waves. Wave 1 is essentially making data more accessible. That’s kind of how most of us use AI today. We had engineers that spend 75% of their time trying to find data [and] 25% to analyze the data. We’ve flip-flopped that. Now they’re 25% finding the data, 75% analyzing the data. Therefore, they’re 3x more effective. That’s kind of Wave 1. Very common, right?

Wave 2 is where you have integral AI into the workflow; it’s part of the team. It’s part of the process and we have teams that are working very much in that realm today. Now that’s not across the board, whereas Wave 1 is pretty ubiquitous around the company. Wave 2 is just really starting and we’ve got two or three groups that are really breaking out. What’s really interesting is by year-end, we will have full-fledged Wave 3 opportunities.

Wave 3 is where you take a whiteboard on a project. You say, ‘Look, if I were to start over on how we do this thing, whatever this is, at the center of it would be technology and then we would build out the capabilities around that.’ That’s true Wave 3. And I would tell you we have early projects on that. By year-end, we’ll have projects completely rebuilt around AI, ground floor as a technology center.”