When oil prices turned absurdly negative in April, it was panic stations at oil and gas supermajors. Europe debated an accelerated shift to renewable energy. Oil rigs in the US turned off their taps as demand plummeted with the global economy’s pause to tackle coronavirus.
But the very week when oil prices tanked, a subsea oil company in Houston signed a major deal to deploy an industrial Artificial Intelligence (AI) product from Flutura, a startup in Bengaluru. It turns out for improving a myriad operational efficiencies to reduce costs with real-time AI analytics of sensor data is much more urgent now for oil and gas majors. “Remote operations are no longer a luxury. They’re now a necessity for industries, and they need digital solutions,” says Krishnan Raman, CEO and co-founder of Flutura.
BlinkIn is an Indo-German startup that helped emergency medical centres in Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, install ventilators on a war footing with remote support using augmented reality, because technicians could not go to the affected area. It also found a critical use case for its AR product in care centres for the elderly in Italy, the second hotspot for covid-19.
Conversational AI startup Yellow Messenger raised $20 million from US VC Lightspeed in April on demand exploded for enterprise-grade chatbots that could take over customer queries from call centres. Its chatbots also became active on channels like WhatsApp as brands resorted to direct-to-consumer sales. Another Bengaluru-based AI chatbot startup Senseforth saw new demand coming from civic bodies in Europe that were responding to an avalanche of citizen calls.
Time was when robots were mostly being made for factories and warehouses. But now robots from Invento and even autonomous vehicles from Ati Motors in Bengaluru are finding their way into hospitals.
