Automation does not fail at the top. It fails in the layers underneath.
Sami Sultan, Vice President at Darcy Partners, ex BCG, and ex Shell wells engineer, returns for part two: a walk through the full Physical AI stack as it actually exists in heavy industry today.
In this episode:
The stack, layer by layer. Cameras reading rock as it comes off the shale shaker, computer vision flagging anomalies, AI agents that sense, plan, and act, and the actuation layer where a digital decision finally touches physical equipment.
Human in the loop. Why the geosteer keeps their job when a few percent of production is worth millions, and why safety critical calls will stay human for a long time yet.
The strange origin of mission control. How a failed military operation in 1980s Iran gave birth to joint command, then to the remote operations center, now the brain of rigs, mines, and factories everywhere.
Why full stack automation ventures go bankrupt. One sensor fails and the house of cards comes down. The aerospace lesson is that automation is a management system, not a feature.
Beyond the buzzword. Why Sami refuses to say digital twin, and why physics informed neural networks are winning the trust that black box AI cannot.
And the next frontier. Drilling techniques crossing into mining, continuous extraction, and the bridge that could finally make Western rare earth production viable.
Watch this space.
About the guest: Sami Sultan is Vice President of Oil and Gas and AI at Darcy Partners, where he leads technology scouting and advisory for the world's largest energy operators and utilities. He spent nearly a decade at Shell as a wells engineer, where he helped found Shell Geodesic, an algorithmic well navigation venture that applied AI to the subsurface years before it was mainstream. He holds seven patents, is a BCG alum, and earned his MBA in sustainability from the Yale School of Management.
