Tell us a little bit about Axora and your approach to working with Oil & Gas leaders and organisations.

Axora is a relatively new business, founded in 2020, built to help Oil and Gas and Energy companies find, evaluate, procure and deploy digital solutions to improve their operations. We provide a digital marketplace of vetted solutions from all over the world, to make it easy to connect our customers’ business priorities with digital innovation that can solve challenges, especially in the areas of cost reduction, sustainability, safety and production efficiency. 

Our customer facing team provides a set of innovative services to augment the marketplace and provide a highly customised experience, including running solution showcase events and responding to formal business challenges. We are a seller funded marketplace meaning almost all of our services to customers are without cost.

Based on Axora’s profile and the recent ground breaking Axora Innovation report – what are you seeing within industry that excites you for the future?

I was luckily enough to be invited to keynote at a recent Energy industry event and I expanded on the key stories coming from our market research which led to the Innovation Report. We surveyed 150 leaders from the worldwide energy industry, and there were some significant trends in the data, that we tested with some qualitative interviews to make sure the insights were strong and clear, and they were!

 So what excites us from our report? A number of things but, in no particular order..

1. Our respondents said that partnership was vital to success in digital transformation

2. Investments in digital technologies are going to dramatically increase in the next few years – going as high as 15% of revenue in some cases

3. Digital was seen as the most important broad initiative to the Energy Transition

4. AI was deemed to be the single highest technology growth area in terms of potential to make a difference

Finally, 99% of respondents said that there was a need for a community approach on digital transformation – one of the areas where Axora is directly supporting the industry.

In terms of the project and as an organisation with a lot of customers in the Energy space – what were your key takeaways and did the findings help to shape Axora’s ongoing message to the sector?

The report was primarily built for the industry – we wanted to bring powerful insights together in a consumable way that will help everyone learn, grow and develop. However, it was also built to help us with our strategy and to make sure we were listening to the industry to shape the marketplace of solutions and our portfolio of services.

We gained a lot from the report, including: challenging us to become a true partner for Energy companies in the context of digital, doubling down on AI and helping customers realise the full potential of this groundbreaking technology, and getting our community fully off the ground to support industry-wide collaboration, especially for the Energy Transition.

As a speaker at the upcoming World Energy Capital Assembly what are you looking forward to discussing with the Energy Council network? Also, what insights and learnings are you keen to access/take away from the show?

I’m excited to able to share further insights, as yet unseen, from our Innovation Forecast report and research, and getting the feedback from all the expert, experienced and passionate people attending the event.

In terms of take-aways, I am looking forward to making new connections with digital enthusiasts, learning about the reality of digital transformation in the context of Energy Transition and soaking up the latest broad industry trends.

Axora are a sponsor of the Energy Council’s World Energy Capital Assembly and Nick will be speaking as a panellist on our ‘Adapt or Fall Behind: The Need for Digital Transformation’ session. You can learn more about Axora’s work in the Oil & Gas space via reading the recent Innovation Forecast. Also, you can check out the recent Axora Podcast series here