SLB and Shell partner to build agentic AI for upstream operations
SLB has signed a strategic collaboration agreement with Shell to build digital and AI solutions that drive performance and efficiency across upstream. The work centers on agentic AI for subsurface operations, well construction, and production-accelerating how technical experts make decisions and execute workflows.
The companies will develop an open data and AI infrastructure powered by SLB's Lumi platform. The goal: unify data and workflows in a secure digital environment and deploy solutions that scale across the industry. This comes from an SLB press release dated December 11, 2025.
What this means for engineers and developers
- Agentic AI copilots: Task-oriented agents that call tools, query data, and coordinate multi-step workflows-augmenting geoscientists, drilling engineers, and production teams.
- Unified data access: Fewer silos and clearer lineage. Expect cleaner integration points for models, services, and analytics running on shared datasets.
- Faster iteration loops: Common infrastructure for deploying, testing, and improving models and agents across asset teams.
- Security-first deployments: Identity, roles, and governance applied consistently across data and AI services.
Focus areas
- Subsurface: Decision support for interpretation, simulation, and uncertainty analysis.
- Well construction: Planning, automation support, and real-time recommendations for drilling operations.
- Production: Optimization, surveillance, and anomaly detection across fields and facilities.
Why the open data and AI stack matters
Unifying upstream data and workflows cuts friction. It also reduces duplicated integrations, competing taxonomies, and ad-hoc pipelines that slow delivery.
For teams, that translates to consistent APIs, shared services, and reusable components running on Lumi. It sets the stage for portable workloads and clearer handoffs between data engineering, MLOps, and software delivery.
Industry context
Rakesh Jaggi, President of SLB's Digital Business, said digital and AI technologies are changing the energy industry. Working with Shell helps speed up development of advanced digital and agentic AI solutions.
The collaboration also feeds Shell's digital strategy and roadmap, enables mutual learning, and targets solutions that are commercially viable and broadly usable across the sector.
Backstory: standardizing with Petrel
Earlier in 2025, SLB and Shell entered a technical partnership to deploy the Petrel subsurface platform across Shell's global assets. That move standardizes infrastructure and workflows and supports scalable digital solutions-helping improve operating cost efficiency.
What IT and development teams can do now
- Map upstream data sources and decide which are candidates for shared access via service layers and catalogs.
- Define identity and access control patterns (RBAC/ABAC) for data and AI services; enforce audit trails and lineage.
- Prepare MLOps and "agent-ops" foundations: model registries, evaluation suites, safety guardrails, and rollback plans.
- Containerize workloads and set clear interfaces for agents to call tools (simulators, optimizers, data services).
- Instrument everything: telemetry, cost tracking, and drift monitoring for both models and agents.
- Align with security on data residency, encryption, and secret management for edge and cloud deployments.
Why it matters
This partnership pairs Shell's operational scale with SLB's digital platforms to speed up practical AI in the field. For engineering teams, expect clearer integration pathways and a stronger foundation for agent-based solutions that actually ship.
Quick facts
- Partners: SLB and Shell
- Date: December 11, 2025 (press release)
- Platform: SLB's Lumi data and AI platform
- Scope: Subsurface, well construction, production; open data and AI infrastructure
- Prior step: Global deployment of Petrel across Shell assets earlier in 2025
Learn more about the companies: SLB and Shell.
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