As oil and gas companies face uncertainty and rising costs, they are continuing to manage costs and step up their digital technology programs.
In its 2026 Oil and Gas Industry Outlook, Deloitte said disciplined growth and managing cost pressures in the face of shifting policies while moving digital transformation projects forward are likely to be major features in the year ahead. Scaling US liquefied natural gas also will factor into the 2026 energy landscape.
Zillah Austin, Deloitte’s US energy and chemicals leader, told JPT that some of the major themes of 2025 are likely to spill into 2026. This year, she said, oil companies have strongly focused on capital allocation and have been “earnings-centric.”
These same companies have been coping with cost pressures, including those associated with tariffs, and many have announced restructuring their portfolios and cost-cutting efforts as they work to optimize costs across the board, she said. The challenge, she said, is how and where to allocate capital to generate growth and profitability in the face of uncertainty regarding policy changes.
“Across the board, (there's) lots of capital focus and trying to make really smart decisions to sustain the growth long term,” she said.
Cost Pressures, Investment Delays
To deal with the ramifications of tariffs being tacked onto the prices of vital oilfield materials such as steel and aluminum, many US companies have created “tariff war rooms,” Austin said. “It's an ever-changing tariff environment that our clients are responding to.”
Those tariff-related cost pressures are affecting the supply chain. Materials and service costs in the value chain have increased by between 4 and 40%, she said.
“That's something that does result in both higher operating costs, lots of supply chain disruptions, and then the investment momentum has definitely been weakened as well,” Austin said.
For example, uncertainty has been a key factor associated with investment decisions. Companies are taking longer to reach final investment decisions on projects or commit to allocating capital for major transformation projects, she added.
“More than $50 billion of offshore greenfield projects are certainly at risk due to deferral, and that's related to inflation pressures and financial uncertainty,” she said.
Companies are also using methods such as renegotiating contracts and keeping larger spare-parts inventories on hand to cope with cost pressures and supply chain issues, she said.
Technology Focus in 2026
Austin said oil-industry clients are increasingly turning to digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI) projects as they seek operational efficiencies. The expectation is these companies may devote half or more of their total information technology (IT) spending in 2026 to AI and generative AI efforts, compared with current spending levels of about 20% of the IT budget.
“This is probably the biggest technology transformation moment for oil and gas companies,” she said. “They are trying to balance cost and operational efficiencies with automation, and they’re using AI as a mechanism to be able to achieve that automation.”
AI and digital transformation projects are moving out of the back office, where they helped improve standard business processes such as finances and human resources, and are increasingly being deployed to optimize field operations, she said.
One area AI deployments are targeting is maintenance, as companies aim to evolve from previous predictive and prescriptive methods to a combination of prescriptive and self-healing approaches.
“Last year, everyone was talking about use cases. This year, everyone's talking about, ‘How do you actually have scaled AI solutions?’ ” Austin said. The shift is “away from an individual use case to ‘how do you agentify end-to-end business processes across the board.’ ”
Merely “agentifying” business processes, or transforming traditionally manual workflows into autonomous systems, is not the goal, she said. The focus is to ensure the company achieves real value from the use of technology in the process.
“You don't just want to improve a widget, you want to improve an end-to-end business process and value chain,” she said.
While the oil and gas industry has a reputation for being conservative in adopting new technologies, she said it seems the industry’s view on deploying AI and generative AI appears to be less conservative.
“Historically, when it comes to technology, oil and gas haven't always been on the forefront of adopting new technologies quickly. And we are now starting to see that AI and gen AI is different, and because of that, there's more interest from oil and gas companies to actually take advantage of AI and technology disruption in a way that they haven't historically,” she said.
