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Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) has signed a multi-year agreement with OpenAI and UAE-based technology group G42 to deploy artificial intelligence across its energy operations, initially focusing on accelerating oilfield development planning and improving commercial decision-making.
The agreement was signed on Monday during the opening of the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (ADIPEC) at the ADNEC Centre in Abu Dhabi.
The partnership will involve the development of AI-powered systems using OpenAI Frontier, a platform designed to coordinate AI agents across complex business processes.
ADNOC said it would become the first energy company to adopt the technology, which is intended to integrate operational, investment and commercial decision-making across its business, spanning oil and gas production, refining, logistics, sales and trading.
The partnership will initially focus on two applications.
The first will aim to accelerate field development planning by integrating decades of geological and operational data from thousands of wells, multiple reservoirs and hundreds of surface facilities, alongside investment costs and commercial considerations.
The system will combine OpenAI’s reasoning models with ADNOC’s existing ENERGYai platform to assess development plans across entire fields, rather than evaluating individual reservoirs and facilities separately.
ADNOC expects the technology to reduce the time needed to prepare complex field development plans from months to hours, potentially improving capital allocation and project planning. The projected time savings have yet to be demonstrated.
The second application will use interconnected AI agents to analyse crude oil supply, demand, prices and refining margins across ADNOC’s integrated operations.
By combining production forecasts with downstream processing, logistics and trading data, the system is designed to help the company assess the commercial value of crude before production and identify opportunities to improve returns across its value chain.
The systems will combine OpenAI’s GPT models with ADNOC’s proprietary industrial data and operate on G42’s UAE-based AI infrastructure. Human experts will retain oversight of consequential decisions, the companies said.
The agreement builds on ADNOC’s existing investment in artificial intelligence, including ENERGYai, a subsurface AI solution developed with AIQ.
ADNOC has more than 200 AI applications and 70 robotics use cases either deployed or under development across its operations, the company said.
It has also introduced ChatGPT Enterprise to more than 40,000 employees, reporting an adoption rate of more than 97%.
The partnership will also include workforce training and cybersecurity cooperation through OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue initiative, which aims to strengthen protection of critical energy infrastructure.
The agreement marks a further expansion of ADNOC’s use of AI, from specialised technical applications towards coordinated decision-making across its wider energy business.
The companies did not disclose the financial value of the agreement or provide a specific timeline for deploying the new systems. The expected efficiency gains and commercial benefits have yet to be established through the announced applications.
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