World’s first large-scale agentic AI success to spur further innovation for AIQ

As AIQ embarks on its landmark $340 million contract to deploy ENERGYai across ADNOC's operations, Energy Connects caught up with Saravan Penubarthi, Chief Technology Officer of AIQ, on the journey ahead for the world's first large-scale agentic AI solution for the energy industry.

In an exclusive interview, Saravan Penubarthi, Chief Technology Officer of AIQ – a pioneer of artificial intelligence in the energy sector – spoke to Editor-in-Chief Chiranjib Sengupta to discuss the positive results of leveraging AI across the energy transition value chain and how the company was relentlessly focusing on use cases that bring value.

The interview followed AIQ’s successful completion of a transformative proof-of-concept (PoC) phase and the announcement of a landmark $340 million contract with ADNOC to deploy ENERGYai and associated AI solutions across ADNOC’s upstream value chain. The three-year contract will see ENERGYai and a suite of related AI solutions rolled out across ADNOC’s upstream operations. The game-changing technology will roll out across ADNOC's extensive field operations, advancing their mission to become the world's most AI-enabled energy company while setting new benchmarks for efficiency and sustainability in global energy production.

During the interview, Saravan shared the successful results of the trial phase that used AIQ’s agentic solutions, with significant improvements to seismic interpretation, reservoir performance and monitoring. He also outlined the roadmap for the next phase of the project, to scale up the entire ENERGYai value chain agents, with a focus on accuracy, efficiency and sustainability.

Excerpts from the conversation:

At ADIPEC last year, you elaborated on the role of agentic AI and how it's driving innovation. What are the developments in this regard since then?

That's a famous question that everyone asks us… I'm very happy to share the results of the proof-of-concept (PoC) trial of ENERGYai that we rolled out last year. The first 90 days of results are extremely important and very satisfying. We have seen an improvement across the seismic interpretation and reservoir modelling by 70% in terms of energy value transition and efficiency and this has given us the confidence to enter the next phase of ENERGYai – which is to scale up the entire ENERGYai value chain agents in H1 2025 to the next level.

So, what we are trying to do as we discussed in ADIPEC last year is that at every energy value chain we will have a specific agent that improves the accuracy and efficiency and the focus on sustainability, and we have started with the upstream use cases [at ADNOC] and we are already seeing the results.

One of the areas in which AIQ is a pioneer is energy transformation which is the central narrative of both ADNOC and AIQ. Could you give us some recent examples and what's also in the pipeline in that journey?

We are very focused on the use cases that brings value to start with. We don't want to do AI for the sake of doing AI. So what we have done and what we are doing going forward is, we have optimised our product line into three specific categories: the focus on agentic AI, with the success of ENERGYai we want to conclude and consider that product line.

We also want to have a focus on our automation which is giving us huge success across upstream and downstream – whether it is RoboWell, our autonomous well control system, or AR360, our advanced reservoir modelling solution.

We also want to focus on digitalisation as well – where for the first time we want to introduce a concept of AI light digitalisation which means that rather than looking at digitalisation from the traditional view of infrastructure, we want to look at digitalisation from the view of AI lens to bring value much earlier.

With all that coming together, how do you see AI as well as AIQ contributing to both decarbonisation and efficiency?

I think our focus is specifically across four different areas: Production optimisation, safety, efficiency, but not compromising on sustainability. So we have been always focusing on that, our product line of Emission X focuses on that particular task across ADNOC group of operations, and we are very happy to announce that we are in conversations with our new customers and partners to take it to the next level.