Artificial intelligence is an area which has seen rapid growth across a variety of industries in recent years - not least among offshore oil and gas industry operations and technologies companies.

Figures show that the number of new artificial intelligence roles being advertised for these companies has increased in recent months - with firms across the industry looking to expand their capabilities.

The number of newly advertised roles stood at 638 in Q1 2021. That’s up from 444 in Q4 2020 and up from from 447 in Q3 2020.

The figures are compiled by GlobalData, who track the number of new job postings from key companies in various sectors over time. Using textual analysis, these job advertisements are then classified thematically.

GlobalData's thematic approach to sector activity seeks to group key company information by topic to see which companies are best placed to weather the disruptions coming to their industries.

These key themes, which include artificial intelligence, are chosen to cover "any issue that keeps a CEO awake at night".

By tracking them across job advertisements it allows us to see which companies are leading the way on specific issues and which are dragging their heels - and importantly where the market is expanding and contracting.

Looking across key offshore oil and gas industry operations and technologies companies tracked by GlobalData, India is currently seeing the largest number of artificial intelligence job advertisisments. Last quarter the country saw 228 advertisements - up from 59 in Q4 2020 and 119 in Q3 2020.

On a city level, Chennai (India) had the most newly advertised artificial intelligence roles in Q1 2021 with 48, followed by Bengaluru (India) with 46, and Houston (US) with 44.

The biggest growth area has been in India - which saw 64 job adverts for artificial intelligence in Q4 2020, increasing to 228 in Q1 2021.

In terms of cities, firms are increasing artificial intelligence hires in Pune - with 12 roles in the latest quarter - up from zero in the previous one.

GlobalData has compiled a list of top MNCs based on revenue. Any top companies that did not have a subsidiary were removed from the list. The latest company annual reports (2019 and 2020, where available) and websites were analysed for a total of 2,188 companies.

For a subsidiary to be included, the parent company had to have a majority ownership/control in the subsidiary. Affiliates, associates, joint operations and joint ventures were included as long as the ownership criteria was met. Subsidiary information was captured at a country level. Country names were standardised. In total, 216,898 subsidiaries were captured.