ADNOC has switched on an AI-enabled Real-Time Operations Center, or RTOC, across its full fleet of more than 120 onshore and offshore drilling rigs, built on SLB's DrillOps intelligent well delivery and insights software. The system pulls live drilling data from every rig into one environment. ADNOC says that shared view helps teams coordinate rig work and catch risks earlier, and that it speeds up decisions across the fleet.
Built and hosted in the UAE
ADNOC developed the RTOC in the UAE and hosts it inside its own sovereign cloud, keeping operational data and workflows in-country. A sovereign cloud is a computing setup run and controlled within a country's own borders rather than on infrastructure a foreign provider controls. ADNOC says the arrangement gives it a secure base for AI-enabled operations at scale, along with wider visibility for its business, asset and drilling teams, and that it ties directly to the company's data security, operational resilience and long-term digital independence goals.
SLB's read on the deployment
Rakesh Jaggi, SLB's president of Digital, said DrillOps turns real-time drilling data into operational intelligence that helps teams make faster, more informed decisions. He said the sovereign cloud setup gives ADNOC "the scalable digital foundation for AI-enabled workflows" across one of the industry's largest rig fleets, and pointed to continued movement toward more autonomous operations.
The efficiency numbers
ADNOC says the RTOC cuts engineering effort by 30% to 40% and lets engineers support two to three times more rigs while keeping effective oversight. The company points to gains across several measures:
- Engineering effort: down 30% to 40%
- Rig coverage per engineer: 2 to 3 times more
- Analysis turnaround: a full day cut to minutes
- Reporting cycles: several days cut to hours
- Incident response time: 4 to 12 hours faster
- Rig downtime avoided: 1 to 2 days
ADNOC attributes these gains to the RTOC combining operational data, automated dashboards, advanced analytics and AI-driven insights into one stream of actionable information, which it says lets engineers focus on execution while keeping visibility across a large rig fleet.
Part of a wider AI push
ADNOC says the platform can flag potential operational issues before they escalate, and points to the 4-to-12-hour cut in incident response time and the 1-to-2-day reduction in rig downtime as results of that. The company casts the RTOC as part of its broader effort to apply AI across operations, and says it shows how SLB's digital technology can move operators from fragmented data and manual analysis toward more connected, intelligent drilling work. ADNOC says embedding the AI insights directly into workflows improves performance and efficiency while cutting operational risk across upstream operations.
