Multi-year partnership with OpenAI and G42 will initially focus on field planning and barrel valuation tools.
Abu Dhabi: State-owned energy company ADNOC has signed a multi-year partnership with OpenAI and G42 at ADIPEC on November 2, becoming the first energy company to deploy OpenAI Frontier.
The platform will help coordinate AI agents across ADNOC’s operations, connecting decisions from the wellhead to the market. Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, attended the signing ceremony.
ADNOC’s existing AI capabilities, including ENERGYai, provide detailed intelligence on its reservoirs, assets and operations. OpenAI Frontier will connect this intelligence across the business, enabling operational, capital and commercial decisions to be considered together rather than sequentially. Human experts will retain oversight of consequential decisions.
Two applications to be introduced first
Field master planning is the first application. Currently, subsurface, facilities and economic studies are often conducted sequentially. The new system is designed to bring them together into a single decision-making process.
OpenAI’s reasoning models will analyse decades of data covering thousands of wells, multiple stacked reservoirs and hundreds of surface facilities, alongside capital and commercial considerations. ADNOC expects this to reduce the time needed to prepare complex development plans from months to hours.
The approach is intended to optimise an entire field as a whole, rather than assess individual reservoirs or facilities in isolation.
The second application will focus on valuing each barrel of oil while it is still underground. ADNOC says it is the first energy company to use the technology in this way.
Interconnected AI agents will continuously forecast crude supply, demand, prices and margins, assessing the commercial and operational implications of decisions across production, processing, refining, logistics, sales and trading.
Supporting better decision-making
Commenting on the partnership, Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and ADNOC Managing Director and Group CEO, said: “The next frontier of AI is not simply doing things faster. It is making possible what was previously beyond reach.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, described it as a “first-of-its-kind partnership” that would help ADNOC “move faster, operate more efficiently and make better decisions across the energy value chain”.
Mansoor Al Mansoori, CEO of G42 International, linked the agreement to the UAE’s national AI ambitions.
“The UAE is building an AI native nation with a global purpose to export intelligence responsibly as we have long exported energy,” he said.
The agreement builds on ADNOC’s deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise to more than 40,000 employees. The company describes this as the largest enterprise rollout of ChatGPT in the Middle East and North Africa, with adoption exceeding 97 per cent.
It also complements ENERGYai, the subsurface AI platform ADNOC developed with AIQ. The system runs on a 70-billion-parameter model trained on more than 50 years of company data.
ADNOC has more than 200 AI applications and 70 robotics use cases either deployed or under development. Its Real-Time Operations Center connects more than 120 rigs in a single live environment and has reduced engineering effort by 30 to 40 per cent.
OpenAI expands its UAE presence
The partnership adds to OpenAI’s growing presence in the UAE. In May 2025, during US President Donald Trump’s Gulf visit, OpenAI joined G42, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank and Cisco to announce Stargate UAE.
The project includes a 1-gigawatt computing cluster within the 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi. Stargate UAE was the first international deployment under the Stargate initiative and the first project announced under OpenAI for Countries.
