In a recent text message exchange I had with John Oldani of The Driller, we landed on the article I am writing today as the next needed contribution from me to The Driller.

I have been living in the world of artificial intelligence, data center proliferation, grid challenges, sustainable water use, waste heat recovery, and policy advocacy on all of these for the last year or so. Through that, I have had many conversations within our industry about how AI could, should, and/or will be used to supplement humans. As you can imagine, the responses have ranged from excitement to “AI won’t replace my crews,” and all answers are true.

The reality is, AI will not replace the people who we employ. However, as I heard a very smart individual say recently, AI may not replace you, however if you are not using AI, your employer will. 

Why is this true? Universities have been grappling with the ability of students to leverage AI to perform work for quite some time. I even prompted AI to write me an article originally. I was rather impressed by how intelligent the response was; it even gave me some new ideas on how to use it. Going back to the university example; professors are generally embracing this hurdle in two ways. 

1. Try to use AI to find AI - by this methodology, they are trying to use AI tools to find AI produced content. This is haphazard at best, and sounds to me to be a bit like trying to chase a ghost.

2. Encouraging the use of AI, training, teaching, and guiding its ethical use - this methodology seems a lot more holistically intelligent to me.

Similarly, we need to come to terms with the reality that AI is invading everything we do. Ranging from Microsoft’s CoPilot, Google Gemini, ChatGPT, GROK, and more, to AI assistants popping up on every website, it is here. Frankly, if you are trying to argue about how it is going to ruin our society, and you are not finding ways to employ it, you are going to find yourself without a job.

I spent an hour this week talking to an AI consultant and creator about how much effort would be required to use AI for a specific, repetitive, but quality driven “knowledge task” that I perform in the drilling business on a weekly basis. It was truly enlightening. As a result, I am further considering how many layers can be folded in, and further, how many additional outputs can be generated. This tool can be leveraged to help streamline tasks, scheduling, QA/QC processes and more. 

In the military, we would often talk about things being “force multipliers.” What is a force multiplier? It is something or someone that allows for the current force to be more effective in their assigned tasks and roles by orders of magnitude (multiplication) than they are without it. With AI, we are able to focus on the knowledge work, allowing AI to take our notes on phone calls, issue us our to-do’s, and even prepare emails for us. It allows us to start getting back to the work of work, rather than spending all of our time preparing submittals, writing or responding to RFI’s, preparing change order documentation, preparing invoices, reviewing timesheets, preparing estimates, and more. To me, AI tools are a God-send. They are slowly allowing me to get out from behind my desk and engage in the industry that I love in a more meaningful way. 

So to this point, I have spent a lot of time talking about why you should. Now the next logical question is “how.” I got started using AI by simply asking ChatGPT or its equivalent to solve basic problems for me. For instance, what is the annual volume of a 400 foot grout column in a 10” diameter hole with 4” diameter PVC casing? It can do the math, however I also realized I forgot to mention to AI that it is 4”. It provided a critical realization for me that I could perform peer reviews with software. It also helped me to realize that despite its power, Microsoft Excel is still only as accurate as the formulas which I feed it; or more importantly, as inaccurate as the errors I create. Moving on from there, I started copying and pasting bulleted scope of work lists and asking for it to write a narrative scope of work. This seems like nothing, but that is easily a 15-20 minute time saver. I hope that by now, you are forming your own ideas about how you may employ AI.

Moving to the field… Will AI replace drillers? Maybe. Probably not. Will AI make drillers more effective? Absolutely. 

When I evaluate a drilling site, there are so many opportunities for data capture. Data is great, however if you are doing nothing with it, why are you capturing it? AI provides us an opportunity to feed data into a computer, and start asking questions. It used to be a requirement that a computer scientist/engineer would build an SQL server data base, build form queries, build charts, graphs, and more. Now, I can feed a set of data into an AI tool, then ask it to build me inferences, extrapolate, graph it, and more. I can focus on the human interpretations of the data while AI builds all of the supporting data analyses. On a drilling project, what does it matter? Can AI identify an efficiency issue before the driller can? If so, perhaps AI can provide an alert that the rotary head is rotating 13% slower than last week with all of the same settings. Can AI fix it? No, however, maybe the head is repaired prior to a catastrophic bearing or shaft failure, thus saving a week or two of real time (and subsequent expense). 

AI will not replace our workforce, however AI will be our force multiplier and allow us to be more cost effective and more cost competitive. Further, it will help to mitigate losses, catch our errors, and allow us all to live with less stress.