Occidental Petroleum's Chief AI Officer: AI at Scale in the Physical World
CXOTalk, Friday, September 18th, 2026
Oxy's Chief AI Officer on running hundreds of AI systems across physical oil and gas operations.
Patrick Bangert leads Occidental Petroleum's Applied AI Center of Excellence, overseeing hundreds of AI projects across physical operations from live camera feeds to predictive equipment maintenance.
Most of Oxy's AI runs on classic machine learning and computer vision rather than large language models, with generative AI reserved for tasks like enterprise search.
Bangert argues a credible AI business case must show material return; a few minutes saved per employee does not meet that bar. He emphasises that AI initiatives succeed or fail on adoption, meaning whether the people doing the work want the tool and can use it daily.