BP p.l.c. (NYSE:BP) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Craig Marshall: Well, thanks, everyone for joining BP’s First Quarter 2024 Results Call today. - All Parts
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While BP is by no means a tech company, their earnings call is nevertheless interesting in the context of AI.
Their CEO offers, unprompted, examples of AI impact in the company, validating software engineering, marketing and support as key focus areas.
Strategically this matters because when these things are brought up unprompted in earnings calls, it can indicate a trend where shareholders will ask these questions of other executives in the near future.
We’ve done an awful lot to digitize many parts of our business and we’re now applying Gen AI to it. The places that we’re seeing tremendous results on are coding. We need 70% less coders from third parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding, the human only needs to look at the final 30% to validate it, that’s a big savings for the company moving forward.
Software engineering is probably one of the most advanced areas where Generative AI is already creating significant disruption in the labor market and job profiles. While conversations about Agents are mostly hype and premature, the injection of productivity from tools like Co-Pilot, V0.dev, Claude and many others is significant enough to cause serious labor displacement.
Second things like call centers, the language models have become so sophisticated now. They can operate in multiple languages, 14, 15 languages easily. In the past, that hasn’t been something we can do. So we can redeploy people off that given that the AI can do it. You heard my advertising example last quarter where advertising cycle times moved from four to five months down to a couple of weeks. So that’s obviously reducing spend with third parties. We’ve now got Gen AI in the hands through Microsoft Copilot across many, many parts of the business and we’ll continue to update you with anecdotes as we go through. But I think this is just a tremendous step change in digital for our company and I continue to look for ways to drive higher margin and reduce cost both on capital and cost.