The 2026 IADC/SPE International Drilling Conference and Exhibition kicked off on 17 March in Galveston, Texas, where one of the dominant themes in both technical papers and discussions is the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in drilling operations.
Jason Gahr, keynote speaker and venture executive for the ExxonMobil Technology Group, addressed both the opportunities and the unease surrounding AI.
“First of all, what is AI? It's not one thing,” he said. “It's a family of capabilities that perform tasks that traditionally require some human judgment, like recognizing patterns, making decisions, and generating content. And each of these capabilities has a different risk profile, and they have a different level of maturity.”
For Gahr, one of the best ways to understand AI is to think of it in terms of its business capabilities. He noted that machine learning is used to predict outcomes while deep learning is capable of tasks such as facial recognition and drilling log analysis.
He added that generative AI has expanded these capabilities to include the creation of text and software code. Less discussed is the control layer, which defines the rules and governance guiding how these tools are applied.
With new oil and gas reserves becoming more difficult to find in the past couple of decades, AI is increasingly viewed as an essential tool to help the industry overcome its technical and economic challenges. Yet the technology is also drawing scrutiny and raising concerns as a growing number of headlines and reports call out its potential to wipe out jobs.
Gahr put several of these recent reports on screen for attendees to consider, but emphasized, “You can view technology as a threat or an opportunity, but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
The Five Stages of AI Grief
The ExxonMobil executive said that, coming from an engineering background, he tends to view AI in a structured way. To explain his perspective, he drew on the five stages of grief as a framework: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Beginning with denial, Gahr said some view AI as overhyped and incapable of replicating what humans can do. In the anger stage, the focus shifts to concerns about being replaced or that AI will make people more reliant on machines and less capable of independent thinking, or “dumber,” in his words.
In the bargaining stage, AI is tolerated so long as a human remains in charge and keeps a close eye on its outputs. Depression follows when people lose interest in their work and begin to consider leaving their post or simply retiring.
By the acceptance stage, Gahr said AI starts to be viewed as a “powerful tool” that can make workers more capable and more valuable when used the right way.
To illustrate his point, Gahr pointed to how robotics were viewed in the 1990s. At the time, they were seen as unreliable and prone to breakdowns. Today, robots are central to factory automation around the world, and as Gahr noted, very few humans now work on automotive assembly lines.
It is a similar story for computer-aided design (CAD).
“When is the last time you designed a rig on paper?” he asked the drilling contractors in the room. One attendee responded that they could not remember. “You don’t know because we do them all with CAD,” Gahr said. “But when CAD came out, everyone said, ‘CAD drawings are not precise, they can’t do it. Real ideas happen on paper.’”
The list goes on, from digital cameras to global positioning systems, which replaced film and paper maps and have now become ubiquitous features of smartphones.
From the Bottom to the Top
Gahr recalled another example that hits closer to home for those in the upstream business.
In 2019, ExxonMobil set out to benchmark its drilling performance across US unconventional basins. Internally, the company viewed itself as a top-tier operator. Drilling contractors saw it differently.
“You’re terrible,” Gahr recalled them saying.
The reasons varied, including a reluctance to appreciate contractor feedback and a pattern of rotating crews, which forced new drillers to repeatedly climb the learning curve.
Even if the contractors were right, ExxonMobil had no reliable way to verify it. Gahr said he set out to change that, initially exploring a high end solution involving aerial imaging and retasked satellites, a plan developed by former defense specialists. The cost, however, was prohibitive—about $10 million per month.
A more practical approach emerged from another unlikely source: a contact with a financial and legal background who suggested using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from European satellites. These SAR satellites passed over the Permian Basin every few days and could track rig activity across the region for approximately $10,000 per month.
ExxonMobil moved forward with the SAR-based approach, and the results confirmed the contractors’ claims. Among the 20 most active drillers in the Permian, the supermajor ranked near the bottom in turnaround time.
Even then, Gahr noted, not everyone accepted the findings. In his view, it was a clear case of denial. “It took us about 6 months, and everybody came to grips with that, because every month we would show them updated data, which was ground truth-checked against ours—so this is the denial stage.”
As more people swallowed their pride and began trusting the data, things changed. By 2022, Gahr said ExxonMobil found itself near the top of the list and was drilling more lateral feet per day than just about any other company in the Permian.
Gahr shared several additional examples before distilling the big lesson for industry professionals. Denial, he said, is an attempt to protect an existing mental model. Anger reflects a defense of identity and status, while bargaining reflects an effort to maintain that identity while recognizing that conditions have changed.
Depression marks a period of grief over the perceived erosion of one’s expertise or craft, along with the formation of a new narrative about one's role. This is followed by acceptance, when someone successfully realigns that identity with the value created by the technology.
Gahr said he outlined all this to help attendees better process all the AI-related discussions and papers that were to be presented throughout the conference.
“We are the people, we are the crowd, we are the industry that provides so much energy that's life changing for humanity. We got to continually reinvent ourselves,” he said. “And if you guys understand where you are in these five stages, it can help yourselves and your companies move through these in such a way that we get to acceptance and we get to a more efficient industry.”
Advocating for Advocacy
Gahr was not the only speaker at the opening session to highlight the role of the upstream industry in providing energy to billions of people around the world and supporting their businesses.
Lee Womble, the 2026 IADC/SPE International Drilling Conference chairperson and a senior advisor at Kinetic Pressure Control, told attendees they are the ones driving innovation in the industry and that their work is widely appreciated. “It is still an engineered industry, and we’re very proud of that,” he said.
He also addressed the role of AI, noting its growing presence across industry events. “Everybody brings [AI] up now in their conferences, but we tried to make sure that we put the right spin on it this year,” he said. “How do you balance that with the human expertise that is also so valuable to our industry? There's got to be a correct balance.”
Womble added that as the industry faces new challenges, it needs to continue to advocate for the work it does and the role it plays in the global economy. “I think that people are coming to realize, again, that we are the most reliable source of clean energy and sustainable production that is available in the market right now—we just have to be able to tell that story,” he said.
Roddie Mackenzie, 2026 IADC chairman and executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Transocean, said advocacy is not limited to communicating the industry’s message externally, but also requires active engagement. He encouraged attendees to participate in conferences, join committees, and contribute within their local chapters, which are located all over the world.
“It’s not just about technical contribution. It's really about being part of this family that we are, that is the drilling business. So, I really want to encourage you guys to do that,” he said, adding that greater participation leads to greater returns for those involved.
Also speaking at the conference was the 2026 SPE President Jennifer Miskimins, a professor and head of the petroleum engineering department at the Colorado School of Mines. A completions expert, she joked that it was “a little dangerous” to be featured at the event.
But like Womble and Mackenzie, she emphasized the importance of participation in conferences, committees, and SPE technical section groups, which connect professionals working to meet the world’s energy needs, “which I think we can all readily agree are huge and growing.”
Other remarks during the opening session came from Junichi Sugiura, the vice president and cofounder of Sanvean Technologies, who was the recipient of the 2025 SPE Drilling Engineering Award. He said it was his “honor and privilege” to receive the award last year and added that “looking back a few decades, I have grown so much professionally and personally, a lot, through these technical conferences that the SPE and IADC both have held.”
Developed by the industry for the industry, the IADC/SPE International Drilling Conference and Exhibition brings together energy professionals including operators, drilling contractors, and service companies to address challenges and advance drilling performance. To learn more about the conference and view the technical program, visit the conference website.
