Artificial Intelligence is advancing rapidly across various industries. According to Forbes, the IT and telecommunications sector has the highest AI adoption rate at 29.5%, followed by the legal sector at 29.2%. From manufacturing to logistics, organisations are moving from experimentation to large-scale deployment. Yet AI in subsea energy has progressed more slowly, despite the sector holding vast volumes of operational data and clear opportunities for automation.
Start-ups are developing sophisticated offshore AI solutions, and operators are actively exploring ways to apply AI across inspection, integrity management, and operations. The challenge is adoption.
Across the subsea sector, promising pilots often prove that technology works, but very few move beyond the demonstration phase, creating a growing gap between technical validation and operational deployment, which is ultimately slowing subsea AI adoption across the industry.
Where does value stall?
Many innovation programmes follow a familiar pattern. A start-up develops a solution, demonstrates it through a pilot project, and then attempts to introduce it into operational workflows. But between a successful pilot and full deployment, several critical questions often remain unanswered:
- Who owns this operationally? Innovation teams run the pilot. Operations teams inherit the tool. If they weren’t involved in shaping it, they often resist it.
- Which department procures it? Start-ups don’t fit legacy procurement frameworks. By the time commercial teams figure out how to contract them, the pilot’s budget has expired.
- Where does the deployment budget come from? Pilots get funded as R&D. Deployment gets funded as OPEX. That handoff frequently fails.
- How does it integrate? Solutions built in isolation don’t fit workflows built over decades. Integration becomes retrofitting; expensive, disruptive, and slow.
Without clear answers, even the most promising subsea predictive AI tools struggle to move forward as momentum fades and a technically successful pilot becomes another experiment that never reaches the field.
Why pilots fail to convert?
Traditional innovation models often leave adoption until the very end of the process. By that stage, several structural barriers can prevent deployment.
- Operational teams may not have been involved early enough to shape the technology.
- Procurement frameworks may not exist for start-ups.
- Integration challenges emerge once solutions meet operational workflows.
- Budget owners weren’t part of the pilot and don’t feel ownership of the outcome
This results in an industry experiencing increasing pilot fatigue, where innovation is explored repeatedly but rarely implemented at scale.
For subsea operators managing complex offshore assets, this is a missed opportunity. AI has the potential to transform areas such as predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and autonomous inspection. Thus, the tools can deliver measurable operational cost reduction and improve decision-making across asset portfolios. However, the added value only emerges once these tools become part of everyday operations.
A different model for subsea AI adoption with Tide Breaker
Closing the gap between pilots and deployment requires a different approach in addressing commercial reality alongside technical performance.
That is the principle behind Tide Breaker, our AI accelerator designed specifically for the subsea sector. The programme brings together global operators, technology innovators, and industry partners to build solutions through collaborative AI energy sector co-creation. Rather than running isolated pilots, Tide Breaker focuses on creating a governed pathway to operational deployment.
The programme is delivered in partnership with Elementz, The Data Lab, Compass and ONE Tech Hub.
Cohort one is already building the momentum with 2 tech companies gaining access to a dedicated subsea AI testing environment and operational datasets to craft solutions addressing operators challenges.
This operator-driven AI innovation helps align development with subsea workflows from the start, supporting smoother offshore integration once solutions are ready for deployment.
The subsea sector has the expertise, data, and innovation ecosystem needed to accelerate AI adoption. What has been missing is a clear bridge between technical validation and operational use. Through stronger subsea industry partnerships, access to operational data, and structured collaboration between operators and innovators, programmes like Tide Breaker aim to turn promising technology into deployable subsea workflow AI solutions.