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 EmpowerAI program. “Colleagues need to know when they upload confidential documents that everything stays within the OMV sphere.”
The tools developed for the AI Hub are built using OpenAI models as a base but they operate on a 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
Tools are not restricted to the office. Our Norwegian AI Companion draws on 2.5 million pages of technical reports to deliver integrated responses, enabling engineers on rigs to focus on execution rather than information hunting.
"You don't want to go through 10,000 documents," Brouwer notes. "You just want to say, I'm at this place, that is the equipment ID, this is my situation. What should I be doing?"
Lexander Brouwer
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.
As Brouwer adds: “If you’re searching through 20 complex technical documents, at some point you lose sharpness and consistency. The system runs through it in seconds, allowing time for more critical thinking and creativity."
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.
This approach also led to OMV’s AI4ALL Hackathon, a two-day event giving colleagues hands-on experience developing AI solutions for real challenges they face in their work. With OMV data scientists serving as mentors, eleven teams learned and applied the full process of AI development, from data gathering to model building to presenting the business case. Their solutions included pump maintenance in refineries, corrosion detection in pipelines, EV charging optimization and accounting tools for financial decision-making.
One standout success was a solution for safety walks. It analyzes text entries from safety inspections across OMV refineries to identify recurring risks and priority areas for attention, then generates targeted recommendations. The system takes multiple lenses: not just location and equipment, but also which contractors and suppliers might need additional safety reinforcement.
The pilot moved into full production and is now helping OMV take an even more proactive risk prevention approach.
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 programme to blue collar workers with handheld devices.
Empowerment, not replacement
These initiatives are testament to OMV’s broader philosophy: AI is a tool to empower our people, not replace them.
“What you've seen with other companies are plans to use AI for a reduction of the workforce,” Brouwer summarises. “For us it is the other way around: we want to empower colleagues, to reduce the burden of analysis and research and leave more time for action, for implementing the transformation that we want to see as an organization”
As the energy sector strives to reach net zero, every efficiency gain and technology iteration count.
By investing as much into creating AI tools as training people to use them, organizations can equip their teams for the challenges ahead and make the wider energy transformation possible.