Empower an information and AI-powered, sustainable power future with Microsoft

The global energy landscape is constantly evolving with one thing remaining constant: the demand for energy, regardless of the type, continues to increase. There are 8.2 billion people in the world today who all need access to affordable, sustainable, and secure energy. Global energy demand is projected to grow between 11% and 18% by 2050,1 and meeting this growing demand will require innovation from every part of the energy sector value chain.

As we witnessed in many leadership dialogues at CERAWeek 2025, AI adoption is taking place at an accelerated speed in the energy sector. The role of AI in meeting rising energy demand is multifaceted and transformative. AI can optimize operations, reduce energy consumption, enhance grid capacity and reliability, and support renewable energy integration. It can also address energy security and sustainability efforts, such as carbon capture and storage, and methane management and mitigation. AI’s potential in the energy sector is robust. Critically, all these innovations are underpinned by the industry’s collective goal to mitigate environmental impact and continue to move towards a more sustainable future, while meeting the growing demand for energy.

Microsoft is committed to helping to drive progress in the energy industry through technological innovation—working to empower the energy workforce, optimize operational efficiency and safety, advance net zero commitments, and grow sustainable, AI-powered businesses.

CERAWeek 2025 takeaways

In March 2025, we attended CERAWeek 2025one of the most influential energy gatherings of the year, which provides a platform for over 8,000 attendees to connect, share and discuss insights, and explore where the industry is headed.

This year, a few key takeaways from the event were:

AI is changing the game across industries, and energy is no exception.
Jason Zander, Executive Vice President for Strategic Missions and Technologies at Microsoft, spoke in the session “Will AI Revolutionize the Energy Sector?” and discussed the ways in which AI is transforming the energy sector with innovative solutions that boost energy efficiency, optimize production, and integrate renewable resources. One of the recent breakthroughs that Jason highlighted is Microsoft’s Majorana 1the world’s first Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) powered by a Topological Core, designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip. This advancement has practical applications to help solve some of the most difficult global challenges. It brings the potential to revolutionize the energy industry with possibilities such as developing self-healing materials, enhancing safety, creating catalysts to break down plastics, and significantly advancing sustainability through more recyclable and reusable materials.

Powerful collaboration with industry-leading, strategic partners is key to growth and innovation.
Several of our partners; Accenture, Cognite, Honeywell, Kongsberg Digital, Schneider Electric, and SLB showcased their industry-leading, real-world solutions in the Microsoft booth. These innovative AI-powered solutions illustrate the immense opportunity to transform the energy industry and empower the energy workforce with modern technology.

One standout demo was Schneider Electric’s new One Digital Grid Platforman AI-powered system that helps improve the reliability and efficiency of power grids. Using Microsoft Azurethis platform allows different software solutions to work together, helping utilities modernize their grids and provide cleaner, more affordable energy at a lower overall cost. Schneider Electric is leveraging Microsoft solutions to improve grid reliabilityand is collaborating with Itron to do so. Solutions like these, built with strategic partners, address the need for a modern, digital grid to provide energy to all who need it.

Transform and optimize resilient energy systems with AI

AI’s potential in the energy industry is transformative, with the capability to optimize operations, strengthen security, and advance decarbonization. To provide the energy that the world will require, the energy industry needs intelligent solutions that address these needs with faster insights and increased productivity.

The impact of AI solutions is directly correlated to the amount of data companies have at their disposal. For energy companies that may have a fractured data estate spanning diverse environments and proprietary data formats, establishing a unified data foundation is a difficult task. This is why Microsoft is committed to equipping industry leaders with powerful, enterprise platforms like the Microsoft Cloud to accelerate this transformation. And with Microsoft Fabric, data, AI, security, and applications are integrated to enable real-time data processing and AI-powered insights so that companies can make informed decisions more quickly. Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy is also an important piece of this energy data journey, and critical to carbon storage and planning. Most powerfully, it can create a repository for all of an organization’s data in a single location. Furthermore, by adopting our adaptive cloud approach and unifying siloed teams, distributed sites, and sprawling systems into a single operation, organizations can increase security, improve data modeling, and leverage cloud-native and AI technologies across hybrid, multicloud, edge, and Internet of Things (IoT) environments.

From there, custom reports and insights can be generated with Microsoft 365 Copilot. These cutting-edge solutions are designed to help energy companies harness the full potential of their data with AI—enabling seamless integration, real-time insights, and predictive analytics to help drive efficiency and innovation across the sector.

One vast opportunity for the energy sector when it comes to using AI is its power to help decarbonize the energy value chain. It’s clear that decarbonization is a critical step towards achieving a sustainable and net-zero future—involving reducing carbon emissions across all stages of energy production, distribution, and consumption. By integrating renewable energy sources and improving energy efficiency through adopting innovative technologies like AI, the energy sector has the potential to significantly lower its carbon footprint more quickly than was possible without the efficiency gains from AI. The recent International Energy Agency report, “Energy and AI” shares several potential examples of cost and energy savings in power plant operations and end-use sectors, such as manufacturing and transportation. For example, AI in transportation can enhance vehicle operation and management, potentially cutting energy consumption—and therefore emissions—up to 20%.2

AI’s potential in enhancing security is immense, offering both vast implications and opportunities. Using AI to enhance security is already making a difference for companies, with a recent study of Copilot users showing that using Microsoft Security Copilot reduced mean time to resolution by 30%.3 Harnessing the power of AI to bolster security in the energy industry, we recently introduced six new Microsoft Security Copilot agents. These agents represent the power of AI to respond to an increasingly high volume of security threats that energy organizations face today. They are designed to autonomously manage high-volume security tasks, helping to provide robust protection for critical energy infrastructure. By leveraging advanced threat intelligence and machine learning, these agents can swiftly detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents, helping to mitigate risks associated with cyberattacks.

Demonstrating the power of collaboration in AI innovation, new partner-developed agents will also be available in Security Copilot. These solutions offer industry-specific solutions, such as the ability to understand sector-specific compliance needs. This approach enhances operational efficiency and will help to strengthen the overall security posture for energy companies that adopt agents, allowing IT and operations teams to focus on their core operations while maintaining a resilient defense against ever-evolving threats.

Our customers like Chevron are also already seeing the impact of AI in their operations, integrating real-time data from IoT devices, optimizing equipment and bandwidth costs, and accelerating decision-making with AI at the edge.

Collaborating with Chevron on facilities of the future with Azure IoT Operations

With its Facilities and Operations of the Future initiative, Chevron is reimagining the monitoring of its physical operations to support remote and autonomous operations through enhanced capabilities and real-time access to data. This includes ongoing efforts to use technology to unlock access to connected data across a vast network of IoT devices—ultimately for greater speed to decisions. Chevron worked closely with Microsoft to deploy Azure IoT Operationsenabled by Azure Arc. This edge-to-cloud data plane facilitates data capture from various devices like Wi-Fi cameras, thermal cameras, sensors, robots, and drones at the edge before sending it to the cloud.  Chevron chose Azure for its flexible infrastructure to control data and scale globally, unifying sites and systems into one AI-assisted control pane. Using AI at the edge, where sensors are located at the equipment, helps optimize equipment and bandwidth costs and accelerates speed to insights.

Learn more about energy and resources solutions with Microsoft

As we look to the future, AI is becoming an increasingly important force in the energy industry—enabling companies to achieve greater safety and efficiency, help secure their operations, and increase sustainability. Key to this growth and innovation is powerful collaboration with our strategic partners and secure, resilient solutions that meet the industry’s robust needs. Microsoft remains dedicated to supporting this journey, providing the tools and technologies needed to thrive in an ever-evolving energy landscape.