BP revealed its Q1 2024 results today while revealing a surprising fact about its use of generative AI, saying it needs 70% less coders.

Gen AI is increasingly used in coding and software development, and BP says the tech is allowing it to greatly streamline its programming needs and workflows.

“We’ve done an awful lot to digitize many parts of our business and we’re now applying Gen AI to it,” said CEO Murray Auchincloss, via a Seeking Alpha transcript. “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.”

Interestingly, Auchincloss acknowledges that human programmers are still needed to verify and validate code generated by AI, as using AI has been known to result in less secure code.

Auchincloss also said generative AI is revolutionizing the company’s call centers.

“Second things like call centers, the language models have become so sophisticated now,” the CEO adds. “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.”

BP’s success using generative AI is also a big win for Microsoft, as Auchincloss said the company is relying on Microsoft Copilot.

“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.”

BP is providing a good example of the many ways generative AI can help companies digitize and revolutionize their operations.