Texas oil and natural gas producers have long relied on innovation to produce more energy safely and efficiently. Today, artificial intelligence is becoming the latest technology to change how that work gets done, from finding new resources underground to monitoring equipment in the field.

“Go to one of our drill sites today and you’ll see the strongest workforce combined with technological advancements,” said TIPRO President Ed Longanecker. “AI is giving us more tools that we can leverage to produce oil and gas in a safe, efficient and environmentally responsible way.”

AI use in oil and gas has roughly doubled in the past year, according to Longanecker, with some operators deploying the technology across nearly every part of their business, from exploration and drilling to production and the back office.

In exploration, AI trained on a company's own drilling history is helping identify new prospects on acreage that has already been explored for years. One major operator is using autonomous artificial lift on roughly 1,000 wells, allowing systems to adjust conditions in real time. At least one operator has drilled a fully autonomous well using AI to manage drilling and geosteering, while drones are increasingly performing equipment inspections that previously required workers to walk the site.

These technologies can reduce the need for workers to manually check wells or operate drilling controls by hand, but that does not mean people are disappearing from oil and gas operations. Instead, companies are shifting some workers toward monitoring, maintaining and managing automated systems.

That is particularly important in Texas, where oil and natural gas production still depends on a highly skilled field workforce. Roughnecks, derrickhands and drilling crews perform jobs that require hands-on equipment handling, spatial judgment and split-second decisions in conditions that can change by the minute. Even a fully autonomous well still requires people on site for safety and maintenance.

At the same time, innovation is creating demand for workers who can combine traditional oil and gas expertise with new technical skills. Instrumentation and controls technicians, automation technicians, commissioning technicians for new LNG and export facilities, and drilling and reservoir engineers who can pair petroleum engineering with data analysis are increasingly important to modern operations.

“AI has generated more data than ever, and someone still has to build the models, interpret them, and fix them,” Longanecker said.

Companies are also looking for hybrid workers who combine field or subsurface knowledge with basic coding and data skills, jobs that largely did not exist a decade ago.

A recent article by the Houston Chronicle noted that thousands of workers in Houston were likely affected by AI, but not displaced by it. Houston has about 12,000 civil engineers and about 2,400 geoscientists, occupations where AI could ease anywhere from 40-50% of tasks.

Those numbers only tell part of the story, and do not capture the much broader group of traditional oil and gas workers whose jobs increasingly require AI and data skills.

Petroleum, drilling and reservoir engineers are using AI-assisted subsurface modeling. Instrumentation and controls technicians are monitoring AI-enabled automation systems, while geoscientists are incorporating machine learning into interpretation work. These workers may not have “AI” in their job titles, but the technology is increasingly becoming part of how they do their jobs.

The bottom line: Texas oil and natural gas has always been an industry built on innovation and a skilled workforce, and AI is the latest example of the two working together. The real workforce trend is not the replacement of workers by technology, but a broader layer of traditional industry jobs being reshaped by new tools and new skills. As Texas producers continue adopting AI across their operations, the people who understand the geology, equipment and operations behind energy production will remain essential to putting that technology to work.