Abu Dhabi National Oil Co said it has put into service a Real Time Operations Center powered by artificial intelligence, giving the state energy company a single hub to manage more than 120 onshore and offshore rigs. The company frames the move as a shift from AI ambition to operational deployment across one of the largest rig fleets in the industry.
The center was developed in the United Arab Emirates and runs on SLB DrillOps well delivery and insights software, deployed inside ADNOC's sovereign cloud environment. ADNOC said the system reduces engineering effort by 30 to 40 percent, letting individual engineers oversee two to three times more rigs while keeping effective control of operations.
On the performance side, ADNOC said automated dashboards and AI generated insights turn drilling data into usable reporting within hours rather than the several days it previously took. The company added that spotting problems earlier can cut incident response times by 4 to 12 hours and avoid one to two days of rig downtime per event.
The rig center builds on an earlier ADNOC and SLB tie up that put a Production System Optimization platform into eight oil and gas fields, using millions of real time data points to monitor wells and processing facilities. ADNOC expects to extend that production platform across all of its onshore and offshore fields by 2027, and has a separate agreement with Microsoft to co develop AI agents for autonomous operations.
For the wider upstream sector, the deployment is a concrete example of national oil companies pushing drilling automation and data centralization to stretch scarce engineering talent across bigger fleets. By keeping the data under UAE jurisdiction, ADNOC is also signaling that operators want digital gains without handing control of sensitive field information to outside providers.