Notes from the Oil & Gas Automation and Digitalization Conference in Houston, October 29 and 30: what the program covered on life after go-live, the data buried in legacy documents, who has access to OT systems, and field automation that pays, with sessions from Ironsight, BeyondTrust, ExxonMobil, Baker Hughes and more.
Notes from Thursday, October 22, at SPE’s Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in Houston: the data center panel with Amazon and Fervo Energy on stage, the special session on getting a real return from AI, the OGGN table on the exhibit floor, and SPE’s session on AI moving into the boardroom.
The AI carrying the most weight in an energy company is usually the model nobody announced: the one that ranks wells, sets alarm thresholds or moves prices. A segment-by-segment map of where AI quietly makes decisions upstream, midstream and downstream, the one decision made outside your company, and who should own each.
In most energy companies AI governance sits wherever the first AI tool was installed, usually IT. That placement is the problem: IT can govern the tools, but only the board and executive leadership can own the decisions AI now shapes. What NIST says about ownership, who should own which layer, and five signs governance is in the wrong place.
Machine learning already sits inside the software that produces a reserves estimate. Regulation S-K Item 1202(a)(7) already requires you to describe the internal controls over that effort. Six questions that bring a stale control narrative back in line with the process you actually run.
Defensible AI has nothing to do with how advanced your models are. It is whether you can reconstruct how an AI-influenced decision was made, who reviewed it, and on whose authority. A six-item checklist for energy operators.
Almost every operator now has an AI pilot that stalled in a corner. The reason is rarely the model — it is governance, traceability, and expert validation. Here is why oil & gas AI pilots stall before production and the readiness checklist that gets them there.
AI tool approval is a board-level governance decision, not an IT purchase. The seven questions directors should ask before any AI tool touches a material energy decision.
AI hit energy companies on two fronts at once — how the market finds you (AI search) and how AI decides inside your operation (governance). Most leaders are managing neither. Here’s what to do about both.
