What is Artificial Intelligence?

AI has become a resource for everyday use. From facial recognition on mobile phones, voice assistants powered by natural language processing technology, such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa or Microsoft's Cortana, autonomous vacuum cleaners to AI in search engines or generative AI in popular applications such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, DALL·E, Nano Banana, Gemini... All of these are part of the routines and work of millions of people around the world, and they do so with one goal in mind: to make people's lives easier. 

Advances in AI are already driving the use of big data due to its ability to process vast amounts of data, learning from it through deep learning, and providing communication, commercial and business advantages that have positioned it as the essential technology of the coming decades. Transport, education, energy, health, culture… no sector will be able to resist its charms. 

Applications of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is already operating in virtually every sector of the economy. Beyond assistants and chatbots, which can understand speech, text and images and generate new content or automate tasks, there are sectors where its applications represent a major technological leap forward.

In healthcare, current systems analyse medical images, cross-reference clinical records and detect diseases with a level of accuracy that until recently was the exclusive domain of human specialists. In agriculture, AI platforms examine soil composition and anticipate pest outbreaks before they occur. In logistics, they calculate routes and predict equipment failures in real time.

The financial sector uses AI to detect fraud and automate decisions that previously required entire teams of analysts. Education has also been transformed: there are platforms that adapt learning pathways to each student according to how they learn, identify difficulties before they lead to academic failure and, at the same time, detect plagiarism in submitted work.

Although it is not yet widespread, there are already several projects integrating artificial intelligence into cities to create what are known as smart cities, where the aim is to improve efficiency in transport, public administration processes and security.

For an energy company, however, two applications are particularly significant. The first is the management of the business itself: the sector generates such a vast volume of operational data that AI has become an essential tool for predictive analysis, algorithmic energy trading and the optimisation of day-to-day operations. End users also benefit – they can manage and reduce their energy consumption from home – but the greatest efficiency gains occur across the production and distribution chain.

The second is the role of AI in responding to climate change. Unmanned underwater vehicles detect leaks in oil pipelines. Satellites analysed by algorithms identify emissions and changes in the Earth’s surface. Weather forecasting systems anticipate extreme events with enough lead time to enable decisions to be taken before damage becomes irreversible. Fleets of drones plant trees on an industrial scale to help offset deforestation.

What seemed like science fiction a decade ago is now part of the catalogue of real-world applications of this technology.