Agentic AI in Energy: Smarter Trading, Lower Risk

Jeff Kavanaugh:

I'm Jeff Kavanaugh, Global Head of the Infosys Knowledge Institute. Joining me today is Mike Short, Founder and President of MRE Consulting. Also with us is Dinesh Rao, our Chief Delivery Officer, and Ashiss Dash, our EVP and Global Segment Head for Services, Utilities, Resources, Energy, and Sustainability. Welcome, folks. Glad you're here to talk about energy. Mike, MRE is known for its strength in energy, trading, and risk management. Can you walk us through what that looks like in practice and what makes your approach unique?

Mike Short:

Sure, thanks, Jeff. Yeah, MRE’s strength in e-Terms based on three primary things. We have a robust service offering, deep domain expertise, and commitment to the industry, and a great team with diverse experiences and backgrounds. Our service offerings range from advisory work where we're doing assessments, software selections into package implementations, custom software development, all the way through to support and maintenance. There's a lot of synergy across those offerings. An example is like our work in support informs our solution designs. So we can take a difficult support situation and build it into a new solution, so it's systems easier to support and more cost effective.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Given that, Dash, this area is especially critical and crucial today given the volatility in oil, gas, and commodities in general. How does MRE's expertise play into your energy portfolio?

Ashiss Dash:

So Jeff, there are two things. One, MRE brings tremendous depth, almost three decades of experience in energy and commodity trading and risk management. So that's a huge plus for us to be working with a phenomenal organization like that. Our clients trust us with large transformation programs at scale globally. Our ability to bring digital, our ability to bring solutions on the cloud, our investments in AI, it all comes together to help clients navigate and create their next opportunity in their industry domain. And energy trading and risk management, like you said, is a massively volatile industry. It's becoming more and more complex. Clients are looking for this partnership of companies that can come in and do an end-to-end solution for them. So I truly believe that the deep industry expertise that MRE brings and the large-scale deployment of technology and transformation capabilities that Infosys brings at global scale is a great combination. We complement each other and we are going to create massive value for our clients through this partnership.

So CTRM at scale. Yes, absolutely.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Dinesh, given all of this, Infosys made tremendous significant investments in technologies, including to Topaz AI brand. How do you see MRE's capabilities integrating into this broad ecosystem that you're responsible for?

Dinesh Rao:

Absolutely, Jeff. Like Dash alluded to, I think their deep domain competency and competency, especially in the ETRM or the CTRM space, helps us actually argument all the platforms that we have built as a part of the Topaz. In fact, the AI co-pilots that we build or contextualization of the agents that we're going to build are in terms of the automation predictability that we bring in, right? Ultimately, it is just not the data, but the context of the industry and what they do, actually would actually enhance our offering to the market. And in a way, they would also be able to leverage all the agentic foundries, as well as the responsible AI, and all the good things that we've already built as an organization. And this would actually layer over the platform. And a combination of the domain competency they bring in, our customer value that we bring in as an organization and the platform would, I think, be a powerful impact that we could bring to the market as well as to the customers I look at.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

So it's really exponential to take this boutique elite brand or set of skills and expand them through agentic AI exponentially. Mike, from your perspective, how is MRE building on this applying digital innovation to this world of risk management and trading?

Mike Short:

We're always trying to bring the latest technology and capabilities to our client solutions. We're super excited about the capabilities Infosys has that we can learn and learn from them and engage our domain experts on the AI front, the training front.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

So while tech has changed and evolved, the constant has been your focus on the market and the domain expertise and serving clients.

Mike Short:

Right, I mean we've stayed focused on this industry for 30 years. That’s why we have the experience levels we do.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Okay, so we got the tech, you got the domain expertise. Dash, trading and energy and commodities is fundamentally data driven. Yes. Okay. And yet, how do you keep humans in the loop? And how does that balance with AI and agentic AI?

Ashiss Dash:

So before I answer that, let me give you a state of the market, what's happening in the trading business. Because of geopolitical issues and macroeconomic issues, supply chains are getting rewired across the value chain. And when you look at commodity trading, oil and gas, or electricity business, there are multiple drivers which is changing the nature of trading in itself. For example, the electricity grid is becoming more and more digital. There are renewable energies that is getting integrated on a dynamic basis. You have consumers, have prosumers, people who produce energy and consume energy together. There are electric vehicles getting plugged into the grid, which can be consumers as well as they can give back electricity to the grid. There are storage solutions that are getting plugged in. So the grid is becoming almost very, very complex at very large scale, right? And this is going to continue. So when you look at commodity trading with the global supply chains getting rewired, when you look at oil and gas companies, trying to decarbonize their footprint and you look at the emerging electric grid, I think data is everywhere and the volume of data is only going to increase. AI can help each persona in that life cycle. So if you take a trader, AI, agentic AI can help a trader make the right decision, take the right risks, control the exposure and so on. If you look at the data analysts, AI can be a great assistant for data analysts to make the right calls, give the right advice to the traders, hedge it in the right way. And if you look at the back office, just to pick an example, trade finance, who do the settlement with multiple parties, we have already used AI to demonstrate that we can improve their efficiency and more importantly, we can improve the accuracy of settlements. And these are just early signs of how AI can completely transform this landscape and we are super excited, super, super excited to have some deep industry domain folks like the MRE team to come in and leverage Infosys AI capabilities to deliver this transformational opportunity that we have in front and clients love it.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Got it. Well, Mike, renewables, carbon metrics, rare earth minerals, how is that factoring into this evolving world of commodities and risk management?

Mike Short:

Yeah, that's interesting. Renewables and the energy transition are really pushing the boundaries of the CTRM platforms. And whether it's real-time operations, more granular data, new regulatory requirements, you know, renewables are highly weather dependent. So we're more dependent on weather data than ever. We've, you know, it makes forecasting much more difficult. You have more volatile forecasts when you're, you know, dependent on that weather data. So, you know, intermittency of renewables is sort of moving the settlement period to tighter and tighter timeframes. Six minutes, 15 minute intervals versus the traditional HRM systems are daily or hourly.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

That in itself is profound. The cycle time and the latency we reduced so much.

Mike Short:

Right, just imagine that you're scheduling four segments an hour instead of one a day, so the data volume's higher. And so there's gaps in the platforms. The good news is we have the expertise to come in and adapt the platform to cover these. But you've got to do that right.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Well, speaking of doing it right, let's have a different connotation of the word right. Dinesh, to wrap things up, how does all this help us do the right things? How does it align with Infosys sustainability offerings and help clients transition to cleaner energy and greener materials?

Dinesh Rao:

See Jeff, sustainability in fact is a purpose as to how we really built the organization. And in every walk of what we do at Infosys sustainability is a mantra that we actually keep driving. And towards that the deep expertise today MRE brings in helps us perhaps now to sit and analyze what the carbon emissions are, what are the traceability in the rare earth materials that you actually get traded and lot of clients that we today work with sometimes extends beyond just the energy alone in really looking at what their scope to and scope one are. Even when supply chain runs or product gets developed, product gets manufactured, scope three. So to that extent, I think their expertise and the domain will help us actually articulate the sustainability better, identify the data metrics better, and help customers actually leverage this asset to really look at how do I do carbon trading, right? And how do we really trace some of those sustainability and help them drive more towards net zero? I think that's a great value that comes to on the sustainability platform today.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

So maybe the hidden, another hidden value, maybe not so hidden now, of this partnership or this merger together is combining that deep commitment to sustainability with your expertise in the very thing that's now becoming more important at MRE. Great. Well, I'd love to talk more, but there is a happy hour to go attend afterwards celebrating this great moment. And for all that, appreciate the time. And until next time, keep learning and keep sharing.