AI (formally known as Automation) is coming! Lock the doors, grab the shotgun and tell the kids to stay in the basement.
In 2025, we read about five-figure layoffs from corporations with six- and seven-figure staffing. Everyone is doing it, rinse and repeat.
All of this is nothing new. Automation has been streamlining our lives for a century. The difference today is social media needs content, and nothing grabs attention better than blood and gore – aka the AI “revolution.”
The facts are different.
If you add up all the stenographers, switchboard and elevator operators, film projectionists, toll collectors, grocery cashiers and assembly line workers whose jobs were shifted due to automation, the total is in the tens of millions, and we have done just fine!
What we should be more focused on is how do we turn our Alberta oil and gas industry into a key contributor to the current AI revolution, so that we have a more significant revenue and profit multiplier on our resources. (Think four-times the profit generated from the simple export of a unit of gas.)
Across all of western North America, Alberta has the best opportunities of any province or state. We have what the world needs – abundant energy in the form of oil and gas.
We are also in prime AI/Tech Gen territory with good weather, no fault lines, open spaces and an effective workforce with a great attitude. AI farms and data storage facilities that require energy to operate are a perfect business case for our province.
Williams Energy CEO, Chad Zamarin stated natural gas was the “affordability superpower” when it came to powering the next generation of technology and AI.
EQT CEO, Toby Rice said: “We firmly believe that natural gas is going to take the lion’s share of power demand to meet this growing AI demand need.”
The most recent energy stances from the worlds superpowers makes the point even clearer. Oil and gas will be in high demand.
Energy is power, and we have it.
For a century, the idea of Alberta being an exporter of finished goods as an economic diversification has been pontificated, however the logistics of such an endeavour make it not possible.
AI and next generation technology will change this. AI as a finished product does not need roads and rails, nor pipelines and pumps. AI and the accompanying supporting structures need energy, and we have it!
