Amazon has a cost-cutting plan for the boom-and-bust oil business

A utility company remotely observes that a tree is growing into its overhead lines, a robot makes a repair in a dangerous area of a refinery, and an oil company is alerted to a maintenance issue about to occur at a remote shale well. These are the type of activities that once were done solely by humans but are increasingly done using technology and analysis in the cloud.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are being applied to everything from maintenance to exploration, and at the annual IHS Markit CERAWeek energy conference this week in Houston, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Salesforce and other technology giants had a much larger presence then they've ever had before.

"The cloud so perfectly fits their boom-and-bust cycles," said Bill Vass, vice president of engineering at Amazon Web Services."Where things go up and down so the ability to scale massively when you need to, and scale down significantly when you don't, fits very nicely with the cycles you see in the oil and gas industry."

"You could see a day when oil companies don't have data centers anymore. That is really the direction things are going," Vass said in an interview with CNBC. "The price of oil goes up, so they want to explore faster. They want to do production faster. They want to use machine learning to increase their yields, to improve their maintenance, to reduce their cost. They want to do all those things, so they can they can scale dynamically to the cloud, and then if the price of oil goes down and they want to reduce their expense, they can just literally turn it off," Vass said.

Rosenfield said now it's being applied to things like enhancing supply chain, reducing CO2 and it's attracting more young people to the industry.

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