Across the energy industry, AI is already having a positive impact, helping us to work faster and more safely. But in our excitement to embed AI, we risk walking the proverbial corridors of our businesses, equipped with a digital or AI hammer, searching for digital nails to hit. Rather than looking to AI to do everything, we must use it in a targeted way, as a means of further honing the things at which we’re already succeeding. And we need to invest real thought and care in considering how best to bring AI in alongside our people, making the most of people and technology working together.
Used in the right way, AI is undoubtedly a force for good in the energy market. It can spot things that human eyes and minds can’t, identifying the biggest risks using the smallest signals in data. This is invaluable in both detecting and managing anomalies in ageing assets, systems and processes in the traditional energy sector and in analysing imperfect and emerging data and information in the green energy sector.
Using AI and machine learning clearly also allows us to do things more quickly. This creates time and space for more “what if…?” questions, in turn enabling us to give our customers more options in how and what they can deliver.
At KBR, AI is one of our key digital accelerators and we’re seeing it deliver great value, both internally and in our work with customers. From the use of simple language models to help forge connections and manage nuance between our people globally, to accelerating our code development, to using complex modelling to advise clients of optimum maintenance strategies, AI is vital in both the here and now and to our future plans. And we’re hard at work thinking about where else we should be using AI. There is, for example, power and value in using it to bridge gaps in design, helping us to solve clunkiness in how aspects of our systems currently work together.
With such potential, it’s easy to jump to conclusions and start trying to apply AI to everything that we do. But there remains uncertainty about how the future of AI in the energy industry will pan out, so being very intentional and specific in our deployment of AI, allowing us to learn by doing, is the measured response. At KBR, we’re looking closely at our processes and deciding what is codifiable and where we need a human. For example, we can and should use AI to speed up calculations around safety, but we still believe that ultimately only a human can make any final safety decisions.
For KBR and companies like us, the trick is to remain authentic and comfortable with who we are. We should continue to see ourselves as an engineering and technology company, albeit we have started delivering new kinds of engineering – digital engineering, with data and AI as tools in our toolbox. At KBR, we have chosen not to be the creators of AI algorithms, but we are the best people to decide how to apply the algorithms to our own and our customers’ engineering challenges.
The real question is how we can create the conditions to enable AI and our people to work together in a complementary way. This will involve culture and behaviour change, which we need to prepare for thoughtfully and carefully. We will never not need humans, but the jobs our people do will be different. We need to acknowledge this and, where we can, make a virtue of it.
The key to success will be to continue to invest in our people, giving them the skills and expertise to thrive in this digital age. At KBR, for example, we’re teaching Python coding language to engineers, encouraging them to think about how they can embed AI in their existing tools, an opportunity which they have seized enthusiastically. Collectively, we also need to do more to appeal to younger, more digitally savvy generations, which will involve fundamentally changing how we talk about the energy industry, shifting the focus from profit to purpose and showing potential talent that they can help shape the path to the future of energy production.
AI is here, and it’s here to stay. It’s on us to manage how we view and use it. For KBR, that means embracing AI positively – using it to make our solutions better, safer, and quicker – but with a healthy hint of caution.

© 2025 KBR, Inc. All rights reserved