Published: 11/25/2025
Published: 11/25/2025
AI is reshaping industries across the globe, from healthcare and manufacturing to finance and transportation. But one sector where its transformative potential is just beginning to be realized is oilfield well construction. This article will explore how drilling data can be harnessed to power the next generation of AI-driven insights and operations.
Generative AI has the potential to assist in designing well trajectories, bottom hole assemblies (BHAs), and even entire drilling programs. With better cross-domain data integration, operators could optimize well designs not just for cost-efficiency but also to maximize production. During operations, AI could help determine optimal drilling parameters, anticipate risks ahead of the bit, and support real-time decision-making. And when it comes to analyzing historical data, having a centralized, structured repository could enable unprecedented levels of performance analysis and insight generation.
Despite the promise, the path to AI clarity has its challenges. Drilling data is often siloed, stored in legacy systems, and presented in inconsistent or unstructured formats. Operators may have used different service providers over the years, each with their own databases, naming conventions, and data standards. Language changes, unit discrepancies, and poorly labelled or missing data further complicate integration.
These issues are not just technical, they are also tied to domain expertise. The knowledge and technical understanding required to sift through historical reports, identify, and resolve discrepancies to create a unified source of truth comes from experience. Deep domain knowledge is key to making sense of complex, fragmented data.
Many operators continue to rely on legacy data stores, but these systems were designed as archives—not as platforms for AI or data science. They lack the scalability, flexibility, and computational power needed to support modern AI tools. Adding more data to these systems won’t solve the problem.
What’s needed is a purpose-built AI platform, one that not only stores data but also supports custom language models, AI agents, and collaborative model development. These platforms must be capable of ingesting vast volumes of data, handling diverse data structures, and enabling data analytics and decision-making.
To address these challenges, within the Lumi™ data and AI platform, SLB is developing the Operations Data Foundation for drilling, a robust and flexible framework designed to unify drilling data and enable AI-driven insights. This foundation includes:
The Operations Data Foundation is more than a repository; it’s the robust data backbone that powers real AI at scale. By delivering trusted, well-structured operational data, it gives teams the foundation they need to train and deploy models, accelerate insight sharing across domains, and integrate seamlessly with the broader Lumi platform.
The recent launch of our Tela™ agentic-AI assistant further expands our capabilities for cross-domain insights. Tela is the unified AI experience from SLB and the first-ever oil and gas agentic AI companion. It integrates seamlessly across our digital products and platforms, providing energy professionals with a trusted AI partner. Tela leverages generative AI and agentic AI to enable users to work more efficiently and effectively.
The Lumi platform powers your experience with Tela, delivering seamless access to energy data and scalable AI tools. With Lumi, you can easily build, deploy, and manage advanced AI solutions—while Tela brings our vision of human-AI collaboration to life, all within a seamless, intuitive environment.
The journey from data chaos to AI clarity is just beginning. The Operations Data Foundation represents a major step forward in transforming how drilling data is used, not just to store information, but to drive intelligent decisions and optimize performance.
By combining deep domain expertise with cutting-edge AI technology, SLB is paving the way for a future where drilling operations are smarter, safer, and more efficient. With the evolution of the Operations Data Foundation within the Lumi platform and the application of Tela agentic-AI the possibilities for innovation and impact will only grow.
Becky Lepp
Technical Marketing Manager Digital Drilling | SLB
Becky is the technical marketing manager for digital drilling. With over 20 years in the energy industry, Becky has held a variety of roles across engineering, operations, business development, and marketing. Her career began in MLWD field engineering before moving into leadership roles, with time spent in technical management, personnel, operations management, sales and business development. Becky brings a broad perspective from her time in both technical and commercial roles and is passionate about making complex technology accessible and valuable to users in the field.
Maurice Ringer
Product Owner Data
Maurice is product owner for well construction data solutions, and is responsible for digital products relating to better integrating and enabling drilling data for domain-driven AI and advanced insights.
Maurice holds a PhD from Cambridge University, where he studied signal analysis, Bayesian inference, modelling, and optimization. He then joined SLB where he has been involved in well construction automation, data analysis and optimization in one form or another for more than twenty years, from MWD field engineer to directional driller, to developing new AI/ML methods for well construction at the SLB Cambridge Research Centre, to mud logging project manager, to product owner for data solutions.
