AI in oil and gas: 92% investing, 50% deploying — a market still in its installation phase

According to the Market.us report published in June 2026, the global market for artificial intelligence in oil and gas is valued at $5.1 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $18.7 billion by 2035, a compound annual growth rate of 13.8%. North America leads with 40.6% of the market ($2.0B), driven by U.S. oil output of 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024.

Two figures capture the sector's dynamic. On one side, 92% of oil and gas enterprises report investing in AI or planning to within two years. On the other, only 50% of executives have actually adopted AI solutions in production. The 42-point gap between intent and deployment is the report's defining feature.

The spending structure confirms the diagnosis: hardware accounts for 43.4% of the 2025 market, ahead of software and services. Upstream concentrates 51.8% of applications, predictive maintenance 32.4%. The sector is buying capacity first — sensors, compute, infrastructure — before extracting productivity from it.

For Cardan-AI, this pattern is that of a general-purpose technology in its installation phase, in the sense economics of innovation gives the term: infrastructure is deployed before productivity gains materialize. The intent-adoption gap is not a sign of failure but a timing lag — returns will follow investment with a delay, as they always do for general-purpose technologies.