ADNOC has signed a multi-year agreement with OpenAI and G42 to deploy AI agents across its oil and gas operations, starting with field-development planning and commercial decisions. The systems will combine OpenAI models with ADNOC’s industrial data and run on G42 computing infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates.
Human experts will retain oversight of consequential decisions. ADNOC describes itself as the first energy company to deploy OpenAI Frontier, the platform for connecting and coordinating agents across business operations. The agreement was signed during OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman’s visit to Abu Dhabi for the ADIPEC energy conference.
The field-planning application is intended to combine reservoir, facilities and economic studies that are currently performed separately. Models will draw on decades of data covering thousands of wells, multiple reservoirs and hundreds of surface facilities, alongside capital, cost and commercial considerations.
ADNOC says the system could prepare complete development plans in hours rather than months. The hours-versus-months comparison is ADNOC’s forecast for the planned system. The new system will build on ENERGYai, ADNOC’s existing technology for subsurface analysis. The planning process is intended to evaluate an entire field together, including the economics of its infrastructure.
Another application will connect production, processing, refining, logistics, sales and trading. Agents will forecast crude supply, demand, prices and margins, helping staff assess the operational and commercial effects of decisions across those activities. ADNOC says the aim is to value its oil before extraction.
The partnership also includes cybersecurity work through OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue program, along with employee training. ADNOC says it has already provided ChatGPT Enterprise to more than 40,000 employees and has more than 200 AI applications and 70 robotics use cases deployed or under development.
Abu Dhabi’s government identified G42 subsidiary Inception42 as a participant in the energy agreement. Its account says the deployment will use OpenAI’s GPT models with inference performed in the UAE.
The ADNOC agreement was one of four signed with Abu Dhabi entities during Altman’s visit on November 2. The other agreements cover government services, investment work with Mubadala, and a five-year OpenAI–Inception42 collaboration across government, businesses and education.
The government agreement includes a pilot already operating at the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority to assess food-import compliance. It converts a defined set of rules into machine-readable form so assessments can be traced to the governing regulation. Officials retain oversight and accountability for final decisions, with model computation running in UAE data centers.
Sources: ADNOC, Abu Dhabi Media Office, The Next Web
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team