EAGE Digital Startup Spotlight: AgileDD

EAGE Digital recognises the role of Start Ups and Entrepreneurs in pushing innovation and new ideas for digital transformation initiatives. The Start Up Spotlight features Henri Blondelle, Co-Founder of AgileDD.

Why did you start AgileDD?

AgileDD was created in Houston in 2016 but the project itself started in 2015 when the three founders were working in the Data department of CGG. At this time, we realized the new concept of data lake and the new generation of analytical tools based on AI will increase the need for structured data to feed the data-based decision process. At this time, the way of capturing information from documents was very labor intensive and the use of the few tools based on deterministic rules was quite limited.

We got the intuition that the new generation of AI tools made available since 2012 could be useful to extract automatically and at scale the key business information locked in the unstructured formats such as the scans of the reports, the PDF files, the graphic files, or any other unstructured formats. The starting idea was very simple: if a machine learning can detect a cat and a dog in a picture, it should be possible to train it to detect a total depth or the volume of an air gun in a report! We initiated the concept of the IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) much before it became trendy!

What is the biggest data challenge today for companies in oil and gas?

At the end of the day, is to provide to decisions makers data they trust. It is really not an easy challenge and it is even more difficult than being able to measure all the dimension of the data quality. At AgileDD, we think it is achievable if the end users are placed in the middle of the data processes and can understand from where the data are coming and how they have been processed securely.

What steps can organizations take to maximize the value of their data?

That is a really difficult question, even, I guess, for an experimented CTO. As it was said some time ago by the DAMA, implementing an efficient data management in an organization is depending of the data governance team capability to clearly understand the company business, culture, tools, organization and to translate these “environmental elements” into “data activities”. The main steps are always the same: Adopting standards, building solid reference and master data to insure the data interoperability, Adapting the data architecture to the business changes (and not the opposite!), Manage the data quality, don’t forget about the data security. But the real art is to put all the steps together in a rapidly changing technical world.

Do you already have any interesting use cases?

Starting from the Oil & Gas domain, we have developed some new business in the Mining, Water Treatment and the US Defense sectors. I think the experience we have gained during this journey may interest our visitors.

What do you hope to achieve at EAGE Digital 2022?

At first, it will be a real pleasure to meet data scientists, geo-professionals, and students in-person after long months of discussions in video calls, chats and other slack channels! So, the first objective is to socialize again and re-invent what should be the subsurface data management once again around a beer or two with friends!

We would like also to show that the IDP domain is progressing very rapidly and some challenges like capturing handwritten values from SCAL, PVT, Geochemical reports which were not possible 2 years ago are now in production. We hope that the experience we gained recently with the Mining and Defense sectors could be reused for some new subsurface data challenges. We have various demos for the ones visiting our booth, and it is the second objective.

The last one is also to figure out how we are in the competition and understand from the visitors how our platform should continue to progress to support their new challenges

If all that can be achieved in Vienna, it will be a great event!

Interested in learning more about AgileDD, visit their website here.

EAGE Digital recognizes the importance of Start-ups and entrepreneurs, and therefore we are offering start-ups a special discounted fee and speaker participation. We’re looking for innovative and disruptive technologies that transform the digital space not only in Oil and Gas, but across different applications of geoscience and energy transition.

Learn more about signing up as a Start Up company for EAGE Digital 2022.