Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC) has signed a multiyear agreement with OpenAI and G42 to deploy AI across its oil business, tying field planning more closely to commercial decisions, Gulf News reported Monday.
The agreement was signed at ADIPEC on Nov. 2, the report said. Gulf News described ADNOC as the first energy company to deploy OpenAI Frontier, a system intended to coordinate AI agents across different business functions.
For ADNOC, the aim is to assess investment choices alongside operating and sales decisions. Gulf News said human experts would retain oversight of decisions with significant consequences as the system draws information from across the company.
The agreement follows ADNOC’s earlier ENERGYai plans and a $340 million upstream AIQ deal. In 2024, ADNOC said ENERGYai, its subsurface AI program, would assist with seismic interpretation, energy efficiency and live monitoring of operations. AIQ later valued a three-year agreement covering ENERGYai and other upstream tools at $340 million.
The first planned Frontier application is field master planning. Gulf News reported that decades of ADNOC records, including data on multiple stacked reservoirs, thousands of wells and hundreds of surface facilities, would feed a joint assessment of field geology, infrastructure and project economics. ADNOC expects preparation of complex development plans to take hours instead of months, according to the report.
A second application would assess the value of crude while it remains underground. AI agents would continuously forecast supply, demand, prices and margins, then evaluate how decisions affect production, processing, refining, logistics, sales and trading, Gulf News said.
ADNOC Managing Director and Group CEO Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, also the UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, said the technology could enable work previously beyond the company’s reach, rather than only speed up existing tasks, according to the report.
Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who also chairs the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, attended the signing, Gulf News reported. The outlet said ADNOC has already introduced ChatGPT Enterprise to more than 40,000 employees.
