From rigs to legal desks, OMV's AI Hub is building custom tools to assist teams across the whole company. And with a range of upskilling initiatives showing colleagues how to use them effectively, the team is driving full-scale business transformation.
We often hear about the clean energy transition at the global level. But this megatrend is being delivered by millions of individuals – skilled workers pioneering new technologies and optimizing existing ones.
Artificial intelligence is supercharging their efforts.
At OMV, AI provides an intelligence layer that connects our people, data, and decision-making to drive safer, more efficient operations.
The challenge we face to truly unlock these benefits is one shared by many large organizations: moving beyond anecdotal experiments to systematic, company-wide AI adoption. OMV has over 18,000 employees across a huge diversity of roles spanning geologists and drill operators, data analysts and lawyers. Each has varying levels of digital integration and requires different applications.
To tackle it, we launched the AI Hub in 2025, a secure, enterprise-wide platform that democratizes AI learning and provides tailored tools to streamline a growing range of tasks.
Secure foundations
“The question we tried to answer first of all was: ‘How do we make sure the platform is safe and secure?’” explains Lexander Brouwer, who leads OMV’s Data, AI & Transformation team, including the EmpowerAI program. “Colleagues need to know that when they upload confidential documents, everything stays within the OMV sphere.”
The tools developed for the AI Hub are built using OpenAI models as a base, but they operate in an OMV environment, so queries never leave the secure site.
From innovation to impact
After establishing these secure foundations, the EmpowerAI team began developing generative AI tools for colleagues, starting with general-purpose assistant, OMVicky. Its model is trained to analyze large documents and data sets as well as the brainstorming and text-editing capabilities of typical large-language models (LLMs).
The team designed for scale from the start, identifying patterns across use cases and creating reusable building blocks rather than building singular pilots. This approach has since enabled rapid deployment of ten business-specific tools including:
- A translator for faster communication between our international teams
- A legal assistant trained with 2 terabytes of historical cases
- The Regulations Assistant for rapid navigation of around 1,500 regulations
- A content assistant to draft copy in OMV’s tone of voice
“If you’re searching through 20 complex technical documents, at some point you lose sharpness and consistency,” Brouwer notes. “The system runs through it in seconds, allowing time for more critical thinking and creativity.”
The impacts the AI Hub has had are as diverse as the tools themselves. But broadly, it enables faster project delivery, improvement in work quality and enhanced safety.
Hands-on employee engagement
Creating powerful AI tools is only half the equation. Unlocking company-wide impact demands AI literacy and confidence across the workforce. That is why the EmpowerAI team has also run discovery sessions to show colleagues how to use the AI Hub more effectively as well as providing a space to ask questions to in-house experts.
With a growing range of tools and proactive upskilling initiatives, the AI Hub has already tripled from 500 monthly users generating 50,000 prompts in March 2025 to 2,500 colleagues generating 250,000 prompts by December. The goal is to put AI assistants in the hands of 90% of OMV’s white-collar workforce and extend the program to blue-collar workers with handheld devices.
Empowering colleagues through AI
These initiatives reflect OMV’s broader approach to AI: using technology to support people in their daily work, reduce repetitive effort, and help them focus on higher-value activities.
“For us, AI is about empowering colleagues,” Brouwer says. “We want to reduce the burden of repetitive analysis, information search, and manual preparation work, so people have more time for critical thinking, creativity, and implementing the transformation we want to see as an organization.”
As the energy sector strives to reach net zero, every efficiency gain and technology iteration counts. By investing as much into creating AI tools as training people to use them, organizations can equip their teams for the challenges ahead and help make the wider energy transformation possible.