UAE’s ADNOC, a leading diversified energy group, has deployed an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled Real-Time Operations Center (RTOC) across its fleet of more than 120 onshore and offshore drilling rigs in collaboration with global technology company SLB, aiming to improve drilling efficiency, reduce operational risks, and accelerate decision-making across its upstream business.

The platform, powered by SLB’s DrillOps intelligent well delivery and insights solutions, consolidates live drilling data into a unified digital environment, enabling ADNOC’s engineers to monitor, analyze, and manage drilling activities in real time. The deployment is hosted within ADNOC’s sovereign cloud infrastructure in the UAE, ensuring critical operational data remains securely stored in-country while supporting AI-enabled workflows at scale.

According to ADNOC, the AI platform reduces engineering effort by 30%–40%, allowing engineers to oversee two to three times more drilling rigs while maintaining operational oversight. The company added that analytical tasks that previously required an entire day can now be completed within minutes, while reporting cycles have been shortened from several days to a matter of hours.

The company also said the system can identify potential operational issues before they escalate, reducing incident response times by four to 12 hours and helping avoid one to two days of rig downtime through continuous monitoring and AI-driven performance insights.

“The Real-Time Operations Center creates value across ADNOC’s drilling operations every minute by embedding AI into the heart of our drilling operations, helping our teams make faster, smarter decisions at scale. Built securely here in the UAE, it is further proof that ADNOC is moving from AI ambition to real-world impact as we become the world’s most AI-enabled energy company,” Musabbeh Al Kaabi, ADNOC Upstream CEO, commented.

“DrillOps transforms real-time drilling data into operational intelligence that helps teams make faster, more informed decisions. Deployed within ADNOC’s sovereign cloud environment, the technology provides the scalable digital foundation for AI-enabled workflows across one of the industry’s largest rig fleets and supports the continued progression toward more autonomous operations,” Rakesh Jaggi, President, Digital, SLB, said.

The AI platform has been deployed across ADNOC Drilling’s rig fleet and supports both ADNOC Onshore and ADNOC Offshore by integrating operational data, advanced analytics, automated dashboards, and AI-powered insights into a single digital environment.

In May, Youssef Salem, CFO of the Abu Dhabi-listed ADNOC Drilling Company, revealed that the company is ready to boost the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) oil production capacity beyond the planned 5 million barrels per day (bbl/d) by 2027, should official approval be granted.

“We have multiple providers from China and elsewhere to bring in the rigs, we have the technologies, we have multiple partnerships with Baker Hughes, SLB, Patterson, others, ​we have the teams. So, we have everything we need to kind of produce any form of demand ​from ADNOC,” Salem said, noting that first-quarter well deliveries rose from a year earlier.