ConocoPhillips is a global energy leader with drilling operations across 14 countries and a workforce of over 2,000 engineers. To maintain operational efficiency at scale, teams need fast, reliable access to drilling data—but that was a persistent bottleneck.
The Business Objective: Give 2,000 Engineers Direct Access to Drilling Insights
Recognizing the need to streamline ad-hoc questions related to drilling operations, ConocoPhillips sought a solution to enable their teams to interact with complex data more efficiently.
They had a ton of questions, but most questions required an analyst or SQL support, which created delays and inefficiencies. As a result, ConocoPhilips wanted to build a single interface that would empower their entire staff to work with the data.
The Data Challenge: SQL, Analysts, and Slow Answers
Despite a sophisticated digital infrastructure—including WellView, Snowflake, and Power BI—ConocoPhillips faced a persistent bottleneck: frontline teams still couldn’t access the insights they needed, when they needed them.
Drilling engineers had to rely on analysts or write SQL queries just to answer basic operational questions—about well status, event history, or job performance. That process created costly delays in decision-making across global drilling operations.
Over the course of six months, ConocoPhillips evaluated leading AI and LLM vendors, even crowdsourcing real-world questions from their user base to stress-test each tool. None of the solutions delivered the level of accuracy or domain understanding required.
“We looked everywhere—from top AI vendors to internal tools. Nothing came close to working well. WisdomAI was the only one that actually understood our data and delivered what we needed.”
This evaluation process made it clear: ConocoPhillips needed a tool that could reason through structured and unstructured data, at scale, in plain English.
Conversational Intelligence for Complex Drilling Data: The WisdomAI Solution
ConocoPhillips selected WisdomAI to address these challenges through its conversational data analytics capabilities.
The solution offered:
- Natural language queries: WisdomAI enabled personnel to ask questions like to help them do a better job and make data-driven decisions.
- Direct data connection: WisdomAI connected directly to ConocoPhillips' Snowflake data warehouse on Azure, providing seamless access to WellView data.
- Flexible deployment options: The implementation offered both WisdomAI Hosted (SOC2 Type 2) or ConocoPhillips Hosted options, providing enterprise-grade security.
- Dedicated support: WisdomAI tied in with ConcoPhilips systems to offer a support team with two remote engineers providing troubleshooting and query optimization, with regular check-ins to ensure smooth operation during the trial period. Moreover, ConocoPhilips worked closely with the WisdomAI team to train accurate AI models that specifically understood the data and business use cases that ultimately beat the accuracy benchmarks set by the team
- Structured data handling: The platform efficiently processed structured data from the WellView database, focusing initially on a handful of key tables.
This collectively transformed how ConocoPhillips approached drilling data analysis, making it more accessible to frontline personnel without requiring SQL expertise, analyst intervention or digging through 1000s of pages of well manuals.
Evaluation and Rollout Strategy
“LLMs are a moving target, for complex enterprise data, getting accuracy is very complex process, one needs to think of all ways” - CP quote.
Accuracy Throwdown: WisdomAI Delivered 50% Accuracy Improvement Over Closest Competitor
ConocoPhillips rigorously evaluated leading LLM vendors and internal tools using real-world operational queries sourced directly from drilling teams.
Traditional tools like Power BI struggled with unstructured text data and dynamic, ad-hoc questions unsuitable for dashboard-driven analysis.
WisdomAI uniquely handled these diverse, complex operational queries, consistently outperforming competitive alternatives on complex operational queries.
Ability to understand complex data
WisdomAI translated natural language into SQL and understood complex documents like mining manuals and contracts, combined with thousands of pages of well drilling manuals. During the rollout, ConocoPhillips employees had unlimited access, proving the platform’s ability to streamline data access.
The main success metric: reducing time spent on queries and reports—showing clear operational impact.
Enhanced Operational Decision-Making
Drill Engineers and Operators use WisdomAI to query WellView data directly in natural language.
Engineers can now access well status, event history, and job performance data instantly. And compare that against the best practices and guidance in the Well drilling manuals in the same interface.
Broader Data Access
Before WisdomAI, answering ad-hoc questions required technical help. Now, frontline teams can get answers themselves by asking questions conversationally—speeding up decisions across drilling operations.
Operational Excellence Through Conversational Analytics: The Path Forward
By reducing time-to-insight and empowering operators directly, WisdomAI helped ConocoPhillips unlock faster decisions—and real ROI—from its drilling data.
The WisdomAI solution delivered:
- Successful querying of structured and unstructured data using natural language
- Reduction in time spent on data queries and report generation
- Improved user experience and efficiency gains for frontline personnel
Want to learn how WisdomAI can bring natural language data access to your operational teams?
