Emerson executives explain how these technologies help energy companies maintain operations and respond to unexpected challenges.
The UAE’s energy sector is facing a demanding combination of challenges. Companies must repair damaged facilities while continuing to deliver new projects, placing additional pressure on engineering teams, equipment and resources.
Traditionally, energy operators have protected their businesses against disruption through physical redundancy. This means investing in spare processing units, additional pipelines and standby equipment that can take over when failures occur. However, such infrastructure requires years of planning and billions of dollars in investment, often competing with funding for new projects.
Automation and artificial intelligence are offering another way to strengthen industrial resilience. While digital technologies cannot replace physical capacity, they can help companies detect problems earlier, reduce downtime and restore operations faster.
In an interview with Gulf News, Samer Najm, Strategic Account Director at Emerson Automation Solutions, and Walid Samara, Vice President of Global Projects Pursuit and Strategic Sales for the Middle East and Africa at Emerson, discussed how these technologies are changing industrial operations in the UAE.
How automation is helping energy companies respond to disruption
For Samer Najm, industrial resilience begins well before a disruption occurs. Companies need contingency plans, rehearsed procedures, reliable instrumentation, connected systems and readily available spare equipment.
The ability to assess damage accurately is equally important. Facilities that understand the nature and extent of a problem can plan repairs with greater confidence. Local engineering teams and service capabilities also reduce the time between identifying a fault and restarting operations.
Walid Samara explained that automation and improved operational visibility can provide some of the resilience traditionally associated with physical redundancy, although they cannot create production capacity where none exists.
He identified three areas where automation can make a significant difference.
Continuous monitoring, alarm rationalisation and advanced process control help operators identify faults within minutes rather than spending several shifts diagnosing problems. This also allows teams to focus on serious incidents instead of dealing with excessive alarms.
Inspection robots can enter hazardous areas before human workers, helping engineers assess conditions and understand potential risks before sending personnel into those environments.
Meanwhile, optimisation software can help facilities rebalance production when individual units become unavailable. Simulator-based restart training also prepares operators to restore operations more quickly and predictably.
As Samara explained, physical redundancy protects capacity, while automation protects time. During many disruptions, time is the most expensive resource.
Why AI adoption remains limited across industrial facilities
Despite significant investment in digital transformation, many energy companies have struggled to move artificial intelligence beyond pilot projects.
According to Samara, only a minority of energy and industrial companies are using AI to fundamentally change their operations. Many have tested the technology, but far fewer have successfully deployed it across multiple facilities.
The main barrier is often data rather than the algorithms themselves. Data quality, availability and integration with older industrial systems remain major obstacles to wider adoption.
Operators are also cautious about relying on AI in critical operations. Samara said companies are generally more uncertain about the technology than opposed to it. They want evidence that it can deliver measurable results within their own facilities before trusting it with important operational decisions.
Ageing infrastructure adds another layer of difficulty. Najm noted that many industrial facilities across the region still operate with legacy systems that were not designed for today’s levels of digital connectivity or advanced process control.
This becomes particularly important when companies introduce closed-loop control, where AI moves beyond providing recommendations and begins influencing industrial processes directly.
AI can only operate through the instrumentation and control systems already installed. The quality and capabilities of this underlying infrastructure therefore determine how successfully companies can introduce advanced applications.
Four steps to move AI from pilot projects to industrial deployment
Samara outlined a four-stage approach for energy companies seeking to expand AI adoption across their facilities.
The first step is to establish clean, contextualised, and reliable data for a limited number of operating units. Without dependable information, AI systems cannot produce consistent results.
The second stage involves introducing AI in an advisory role. The technology can provide recommendations while human operators retain authority over decisions.
Companies can then move towards bounded closed-loop control within a single operating unit. Before introducing such applications into live operations, they should be thoroughly tested through simulation.
The final stage involves replicating successful applications across additional units and facilities. However, each AI model requires clear ownership, maintenance arrangements, and regular updates to account for changing operating conditions.
Samara also cautioned against assuming that one AI model will work across every facility. Industrial units differ in their feedstocks, operating conditions and historical performance data. Models must reflect the requirements of individual sites.
Companies seeing the strongest returns are treating AI as part of everyday industrial operations rather than as a standalone technology experiment.
Autonomous robots and the changing role of human operators
The use of autonomous robots and AI-powered control systems raises another question for the energy industry: how much operational authority should companies give to machines?
Samara said autonomy should be introduced gradually, with clearly defined limits. Safety instrumented systems and basic process control layers must remain independent of AI optimisation. This ensures that AI applications can be overridden or removed without compromising a facility’s fundamental safety protections.
Autonomous systems must also operate within established limits, with specific conditions determining when control should return to human operators.
Before deployment, these applications should be tested in simulators against a wide range of abnormal operating scenarios.
AI is particularly suited to optimisation and repetitive calculations involving numerous possibilities. However, decisions involving safety-critical operations or unusual process conditions should remain under direct human control.
As automation becomes more common, operators are also moving away from continuous manual control towards supervision. Their responsibilities increasingly involve monitoring the wider facility, managing exceptions and deciding when human intervention is necessary.
This shift creates a risk of skill fade. Operators who rarely intervene manually may gradually lose the practical experience needed to respond when automated systems fail or encounter unexpected conditions.
Regular simulator-based training will therefore remain important. Even as facilities become more autonomous, operators must retain the ability to take control when circumstances demand it.
Why local engineering capabilities matter to the UAE energy sector
Repairing existing facilities while developing new projects is also changing what energy companies expect from technology providers.
According to Samara, operators increasingly want suppliers with a genuine presence in the UAE, rather than companies that simply sell equipment and services into the market.
This includes local engineering support, readily available inventory, shorter delivery times and technical expertise on the ground.
The UAE’s In-Country Value (ICV) programme, now mandatory for national companies, reinforces this expectation. However, Samara noted that customers were already moving towards local supplier partnerships because having technical teams close to their operations can reduce lead times and improve responsiveness.
The relationship is increasingly expected to extend beyond equipment purchases. Companies want long-term partners that can support projects throughout their lifecycle.
Where the UAE’s next energy investments are expected
Looking ahead, Samara expects several areas to attract investment across the UAE’s energy industry.
Export infrastructure is one of them, particularly the expansion of pipeline capacity towards Fujairah. Upstream development will also remain important as the country works towards its target of achieving five million barrels per day in oil production capacity.
Gas projects, including new upstream developments and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities, are expected to attract further investment.
Beyond traditional energy operations, power generation, water infrastructure and data centres are also expanding. Each of these industries depends on continuous, reliable and efficient operations.
This makes automation, measurement technologies and digital capabilities important parts of future projects. According to Samara, these systems need to be integrated from the earliest stages of development, both to protect delivery schedules and to ensure new facilities have the data infrastructure required to operate efficiently from day one.
The direction is clear. As the UAE expands its energy and industrial infrastructure, resilience will depend on more than spare equipment and additional production capacity. Reliable data, capable engineering teams, carefully controlled automation, and human expertise will all play a role in keeping operations running through disruption.
Photo: Samer Najm, Strategic Account Director at Emerson Automation Solutions, and Walid Samara, Vice President – Global Projects Pursuit and Strategic Sales, Middle East and Africa
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Source: Gulf News
