Opinion: Energy industry is late to the next transformative technology wave
By Toni Fadnes, eDrilling
“It is amazing how late the energy industry again is in leveraging the technology waves. We are at the tail-end of the internet/SaaS era, and most companies in our industry have not even joined that yet.”
I made this comment recently in an interview, and it keeps ringing in my ears—not really as a critique but more as a warning. As engineers, we've seen firsthand how the oil and gas sector often approaches technology adoption cautiously—sometimes to our benefit but increasingly to our detriment.
We did not start out so bad, with a number of entrepreneurs betting on the PC revolution early, developing solutions that got widespread adoption: Technoguide’s Petrel, Peloton’s wellWiew, Hitec’s Cyberbase and DCS, and Petec’s Drillbench, to name a few.
Not so much with the next wave. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) emerged in the early 2000s and matured rapidly through the 2010s. It transformed entire industries, from finance and retail to manufacturing, by enabling scalable, cost-efficient, cloud-based software delivery. Salesforce, Snowflake, ServiceNow and Workday all became standard tools across industries.
In the oil and gas industry, the uptake of SaaS has been slow, fragmented and often superficial. Legacy systems, long procurement cycles, cybersecurity concerns and organizational inertia all played their part. Even today, many companies are running critical operations on on-prem systems, Excel spreadsheets or siloed desktop applications. Suppliers are as much to blame as anyone. Solutions from the likes of Oliasoft and Corva are great, but the industry should have had them 10+ years ago. And the incumbents are still patching together their SaaS platform offerings. It’s not that company leaders did or do not understand the value—they were just late. It was a missed opportunity.
Fast forward to today and we are living through a transformative AI revolution, where intelligent systems are reshaping industries, accelerating innovation and redefining human-machine collaboration. From generative models to autonomous agents (or AI-powered engineers), AI is no longer futuristic; it’s foundational, unlocking unprecedented efficiency, creativity and decision-making power across every sector of the global economy.
Imagine AI that monitors sensor data from a fleet of compressors, detects anomalies, triages which required action and opens work orders—all without a human in the loop. Or imagine a set of agents that coordinate drilling logistics based on weather forecasts, equipment availability and historical NPT patterns. In layman terms, they can basically take care of all the non-engineering parts of an engineer’s job.
Add physics to the mix, and AI agents become accurate and contextual because they understand the logic and physics of the process at hand. Enabling AI-powered engineers will safely orchestrate, optimize and automate some of the more complex workflows in the industry, like well construction or reservoir engineering.
The good news? We’ve seen this movie before. The industry is no stranger to complexity or automation. It has built control systems, predictive models and optimization routines for decades. We know what late adoption looks like and what it costs.
This is a call to act, not just observe. PCs and SaaS improved efficiency. The next wave will reshape what we do and how we think about decarbonization, energy security and energy transformation altogether, as well as shift competitiveness. It will compress decision-making cycles, alter organizations and unlock value from operational understanding in ways we’ve only theorized about before. Companies that adopt early will pull ahead fast—not just incrementally but by orders of magnitude. Companies that lag may not catch up.
Let’s get in early this time around.
