Automa discussed how offshore operators are investing in digitalisation, and most now have a portfolio of successful pilots – a robot that completed its inspection rounds, a model that flagged the right anomaly, a remote-monitoring trial that kept a normally unattended installation safe. However, few can point to the same technology running across the fleet three years later.
This gap, between pilot and fleet, shaped much of the discussion at the Oil and Gas Automation and Digitalisation Congress (Automa) 2026, held in Amsterdam on 5–6 October.
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The Congress took place with the support of regional partners Shell Energy and Chemicals Park Rheinland, Fluor, Linde, MOL Group, Repsol and Saipem, as well as premier sponsor Tata Consultancy Services, principal sponsor Abeeway and diamond sponsor HiveMQ.
Over two days, 300 delegates from 150 companies and 40 countries heard 50 speakers discuss the digital technologies shaping the oil and gas sector. Discussions around scaling focused on three things areas: the data underneath technology, the organisation that absorbs it and the question of who answers for it, once it starts to act.
Autonomy runs on context
Repsol’s A Coruña refinery offered a clear example of autonomy in daily operations, with robots, cameras, drones and AI integrated into routine plant supervision. Siemens pushed the idea further, setting out autonomous process operations built on comprehensive digital twins. Both rest on the same condition: a robot can capture a reading, but acting on it requires knowing which asset it belongs to, what its history looks like and what counts as normal.
Christoph Attila Kun, manager director of Digital Data Chain Service, addressed this, presenting digital twins as the data foundation AI needs across engineering, operations and maintenance. Meanwhile, pre-sales and technical account manager at Ab Initio Software, James Penfold, approached it from a different angle, considering why AI agents fail when the data they work with lacks context and governance.
Getting the data off the asset
Offshore, data transfer is a challenge. Maarten Verhaegh, energy and resources practice director at SES Satellites, argued that space is becoming the operating layer of upstream digitalisation. A roundtable on autonomous Internet of Things technologies followed the same line from 5G to satellite and considered the cybersecurity work that must sit beneath.
Detection itself is moving closer to the source and becoming continuous. TotalEnergies presented AGLED, its acoustic approach to early gas leak detection, and NAFTOSENSE showed Industrial IoT rope sensors for real-time fluid leak detection in remote infrastructure. Each is only as useful as the link that carries its alarm to shore.
Pilots do not scale themselves
Michel Teughels, formerly innovation and strategy manager at ExxonMobil, considered a difficult question: how to roll out new AI solutions without hindering the organisation. Presenting, he turned to AI in the remote-control room, where scaled technology meets the operating team.
The closing panel put start-ups and majors on the same stage to discuss what it takes for an experimental idea to become something a major operator will deploy. Founder and CEO at Fieldnode, Christian Duun Norberg, presented a supply side example: digital inventories and on-demand manufacturing of spare parts, now moving from pilot to practice in the energy sector.
Project delivery featured too. McDermott and Fluor looked at where AI adds value in engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) execution and project controls – the stage at which many assets acquire the data debt their operators later inherit.
Who answers for the algorithm
As AI moves from advising to acting, accountability is becoming the first question operators ask. Director of digital commercialisation and advanced operation solutions at Linde, Stephan Hazzam, addressed accountability from an operations perspective at the executive opening panel on building trust and accountability for AI solutions.
Ruchita Puri, digital and AI transformation leader at Shell, spoke on AI governance and responsible deployment. Across the sessions, the emphasis shifted, moving from what models can do, to who signs them off and how they are kept in check once in service.
Where the answers come from
Successful implementation of emerging digital technologies requires collaboration. Data debt is created during the project and inherited in operations, and a pilot scales only when there is a shared vision of success between the provider, the asset team and the risk assessors.
That is why so much of Automa happens away from the stage. The Congress is held behind closed doors, with participation curated around operators, EPC companies and technology providers. This year, those conversations led to 265 business-to-business meetings over two days.
Andreas Eriksson, executive director at Abeeway, described the room: “There are a lot of good companies here, high-quality people, decision-makers. I think this is the place to be if you want to be in this business.”
The pilot-to-fleet question will not be settled in a year, and Automa will return to discussions at its tenth anniversary edition on 18–19 October 2027 in Vösendorf, Austria.
