26 Oct 2026・4 min read By Nada Al Meqbali, Acting Senior Vice President, Future Foresight & Creative Lab, ADNOC Energy sector leaders are right to want AI in more people’s hands, and to want it there quickly. These powerful tools can unlock new possibilities for safety, efficiency and value creation across an industry built on complex assets, safety-critical operations and the reliable supply of energy and materials that economies depend on. As adoption grows, so does our understanding of what it takes to turn that potential into lasting value. The strongest deployments are built on secure systems, sound governance and clear accountability, giving people the confidence to use AI ambitiously while continuing to apply their own judgment. I came into this work through smart-field projects after joining ADNOC in 2014 and have since led the development and deployment of more than 30 AI tools across the organization. That experience has reinforced my view that the deployments that deliver the greatest value are the ones our people help to shape and trust. At ADNOC, we bring engineers into AI projects early. An engineer who has spent years on a producing asset carries a model of their own: what a compressor sounds like when it is unhappy, why the numbers from a particular separator run slightly high, or how a reading behaves on a hot afternoon. In energy, this is valuable field intelligence. Our engineers and operators understand the processes AI tools are modelling and know when an insight can be applied to operations and when it needs another review. Their experience, combined with their role in co-designing these tools, supports safe adoption and drives value for the business. Energy makes the stakes tangible. A model that misreads critical data such as pressure or temperature might cascade that error into a query to an AI agent, which could then provide operators with inaccurate guidance. Embedding engineering expertise in the way tools are designed and deployed helps ensure that seasoned operators can assess these outputs for quality and accuracy.