Capturing the AI advantage through culture change

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Oil Review Middle East, May 30, 2025

by James Thomas, Shantanu Gautam, and Pavel Evteev



The GCC’s national oil companies (NOCs) must put AI to work if they are to keep delivering the world’s lowest cost and lowest carbon footprint barrels. To achieve this, NOCs need organisational cultures that can quickly produce many small, high-impact artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

AI-powered solutions are the next major cost and efficiency frontier in the oil and gas industry. Leading oil majors are already using them to produce oil faster, at lower cost and resource intensity. For example, AI can accelerate subsurface analysis, reduce uncertainty, and optimise capital allocation. Shell partnered with startup Avathon (formerly SparkCognition) and is using AI-powered deep learning to reduce seismic shots by 99%, maintaining image accuracy while cutting exploration time from nine months to just nine days.

Beyond exploration, AI is transforming well planning, automating drilling, predicting conditions, and streamlining workflows. ExxonMobil, collaborating with IBM, used AI to reduce well planning and design time from nine to seven months, and cut data preparation time by 40%.

Drilling optimisation is another area seeing major gains. AI can now analyse real-time downhole data, optimise rate of penetration, and predict failures. Machine learning can adjust drilling parameters dynamically, reducing non-productive time, cutting costs, and improving well economics. ConocoPhillips used three years of drilling data to develop a machine learning model that improved vertical rate of penetration by 20% and reduced premature drilling-motor failures by 65% – saving US$30,000 per well.

Environmental performance is improving too. AI can track emissions in real time, detect leaks, and increase carbon capture. Chevron deployed AI to optimise methane emissions reduction in upstream operations, helping cut methane emission intensity by 60%.

NOCs across the region are also making tangible progress in applying AI to boost performance. Aramco, for example, deployed 40,000 sensors across 500 wells, enabling AI-driven process control that increased production by 15% and halved troubleshooting time. ADNOC’s Emission X tool helped abate 1 million tonnes of CO2 in one year through AI-powered emissions prediction and optimisation. Read the rest here.

Caring for the Carers: Investing in healthcare workforce wellbeing

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy& Middle East, May 2025

by Irfan Merali, Dr. Christelle Abou Nader, and Andrew AlHamouch

The health of the GCC’s population depends on the wellbeing of its healthcare workforce. It is a key lever for improving the quality of care provided by the region’s 800,000 healthcare professionals, and for reducing the cost of care. Our analysis indicates that improving healthcare workforce wellbeing in the GCC countries potentially could generate US$ 2.5 billion in annual savings.

Healthcare is a rewarding and demanding profession. Long hours, high intensity work environments, and physically demanding tasks contribute to elevated incidences of chronic fatigue, musculoskeletal injuries, and other health problems. Nearly half of healthcare workers globally suffer from burnout. Almost as many experience musculoskeletal issues each year. We find comparable rates in the GCC’s healthcare systems.

These conditions harm healthcare workers and patients. Mental and physical wellbeing challenges drive up absenteeism, turnover, and job dissatisfaction, all of which increase medical errors, lower patient satisfaction, and diminish compassionate care. Research into the effects of burnout among doctors, for example, shows that it is associated with a fourfold decrease in job satisfaction. Doctors experiencing burnout are 2.2 times more likely to have made a recent medical error. Thus, current conditions foster a vicious cycle with systemic and financial repercussions.

As these conditions worsen, healthcare systems become increasingly stretched, with workforce shortages intensifying these pressures. The wellbeing of the GCC’s healthcare workforce is a large-scale issue with system-wide implications that should be investment priorities. Evidence-based research proves that investing in healthcare worker wellbeing yields tangible benefits, including a 17% reduction in absenteeism, an 11% decrease in turnover, and productivity gains of up to 25%. Read the rest here.

The Personalization Imperative: Driving telecom growth with AI-powered marketing

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy& Middle East, April 2025

by GP Singh, Mahmoud Makki, Tarek Matar, and Ankit Kushwaha




Customers in every industry are demanding personalized, real-time engagement across channels, whether it is social media, mobile apps, or retail stores online and offline. They expect to be uniquely understood in the moment.

Marketers know that personalization is critical to relevance and differentiation, revenue growth, and brand value. Leaders are tackling this challenge head-on. First, they are gathering massive, proprietary data sets of customer information. Unilever, for example, is on a mission to create 1 billion one-on-one customer relationships by analyzing interactions across digital and in-store touch points for marketing insights. Second, such leaders are creating integrated marketing technology (MarTech) stacks to enable real-time personalization. McDonald’s integrated its MarTech to deliver personalized drive-through menus, mobile app offers, and in-store experiences, increasing its digital customer frequency by 10 percent and raising customer spending. Third, these leaders are exploiting real-time insights to get their concept into the market faster. Such agility allowed Coca-Cola to quickly move from a concept to the production of personalized bottles and cans in its “Share a Coke” campaign, which it launched in Australia and then expanded globally, and grow sales by 2.5 percent in a year in the competitive U.S. market.

Telecom operators are uniquely positioned to fulfill the personalization imperative. Their data sets, which include real-time location data, usage patterns, and customer service interactions, are broader and richer than those of industries such as finance or retail.

The problem is that many telecom operators are struggling to tap this gold mine of insights. In many cases, they are unable to deliver the right offer at the right place and the right time to their customers. We find that telecom companies typically utilize only 30 to 50 percent of their data. Senior telecom executives worry that disconnected MarTech stacks and skills gaps are holding them back.

Data-fueled, AI-powered marketing engines can unlock the potential for personalization. Such engines can produce the insights needed for personalized engagement, promote more informed decisions, and create the precision targeted strategies needed to enhance returns and deliver competitive advantage. Our analysis shows that for telecom companies in the early stages of their customer value management (CVM) journey, every $1.00 invested in AI-powered, data-fueled marketing can yield up to $5.90 in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) gains over five years. (Read the rest here.)

Film and beyond: Leapfrogging into the global screen industry

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BroadcastPro Middle East, February 5, 2025

by Tarek Matar, Karim Sarkis and Maansi Sagar



Ongoing transformation in the global screen industry has created an opportunity for GCC countries to establish themselves as prominent players. As the industry grapples with the future of content creation and the demands of a global audience, the combination of an appetite for investment in state-of-the-art technologies and media hubs, a focus on attracting investors and producers, a young and digitally-savvy workforce, and a culture rich with stories and landscapes could enable the GCC region to become a centre of cinematic innovation. Success in this endeavour will require a collaborative effort between governments and the private sector to bridge the silos of geography, technology and media industry verticals.

The screen industry, which has expanded beyond movies and movie theatres, is facing the uncertainties that accompany the impact of new technologies on its production value chain, particularly GenAI (simply defined here as artificial intelligence that can generate video content from text, image and video prompts). Video tools like Runway and Meta’s Movie Gen, along with virtual production and other advancements, are raising questions: Will content be generated versus filmed? Will soundstages and physical locations still be needed? What talent and skills will be essential? How will budgets and timelines be affected?

Creatives are soul-searching. Infrastructure investors are hesitating. Media conglomerates are experimenting. Big Tech is pouring billions into new tools. Yet the value is there to be captured. Strategy& forecasts that global video revenues – cinema, OTT services and TV – will increase by approximately $165bn to $564bn by 2028.

Simultaneously, audience and economic dynamics are changing, driven by shifting viewer preferences and industry budgetary pressures. Audiences are fuelling demand for locally-produced content as they search beyond the once-dominant Hollywood-centric model in search of relatable storytelling, cultural representation and authentic experiences. Film producers must do more with less as distribution and streaming platforms focus on profitability and tighten their budgets, thus making cheaper international content more appealing.

This uncertainty and the changing dynamics create an opportunity for the GCC’s forward-leaning economies to position themselves as a global film production hub with five actions. Read the rest here.

Redefining the social contract: Policy options for economic inclusion and fiscal sustainability

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy& Middle East, January 2025

by Chadi N. Moujaes, Sami Zaki, Mitcha Sleiman and Dr. Steffen Hertog

Following the 1970s oil boom, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)1 countries developed a generous welfare model offering a wide range of benefits to nationals, including public-sector employment, energy subsidies, a variety of non-means-tested categorical benefits, and free public services such as education and healthcare. Governments now understand that this implicit social contract needs reform, given fiscal constraints and demographic pressures. 

Although GCC governments are responding to this challenge, thus far reforms have been piecemeal. Creating a new social contract requires simultaneous fiscal reform, welfare modernization, and labor policy changes. Moreover, governments need to design and implement the contract components specifically for each country’s needs. 

There are five policy tools that GCC governments can consider as they redesign their social contracts, described below: 

• Permanent income supplements for lower earners can make private-sector employment more attractive to nationals. Such income support ensures that the shift away from public-sector employment does not result in “working poor.” 

• Active labor market policies, including lifelong learning, job services, and training, can support nationals’ integration into the private sector. 

• Universal basic income (UBI) can provide all nationals with income security, while maintaining incentives for private-sector entrepreneurship and work. 

• Means-tested social benefits can support those that need it most, while reducing welfare dependency and fraud. 

• Integration of foreign residents through dedicated welfare tools, such as a modest minimum wage, can attract and ensure a ready workforce of foreigners, while reducing the differential in labor rights and costs that discourages employers from hiring nationals.

A new social contract in GCC countries can provide opportunities to all nationals, guarantee basic welfare for all, incentivize and improve the rewards for private economic activity, ensure fiscal sustainability, and minimize economic distortions. Read the full report here.

Don’t Confuse Ambition With Effective Leadership

Insights by Stanford Business, January 15, 2025

by Theodore Kinni



There’s an old saw — cribbed from Plato and popularized by Douglas Adams — that those people who are most interested in leading others are least suited to the task. That’s not entirely accurate, yet new research has found a grain of truth in this idea: Many leaders have plenty of ambition to lead, but that’s no guarantee others think they’re effective.

“Our society assumes that there is a link between leadership ambition and leadership aptitude,” explains Francis Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. People seeking power and success step up to take leadership roles, and how we select leaders rewards that ambitiousness. “We largely rely on opt-in mechanisms to populate our pools of potential leaders — the people who apply to business schools like Stanford or seek a promotion to the next level in their organizations,” Flynn says. “That assumes implicitly that those people who want to lead are the ones who should lead. But is that assumption valid?”

Though it is clear that ambition plays a significant role in who becomes a leader, its link to leadership effectiveness has not been extensively studied. So Flynn, with Shilaan Alzahawi and Emily S. Reitopen in new window, PhD ’22, undertook the first systematic study of that relationship. Read the rest here.