The future of energy isn’t about simply finding oil and gas - it’s about finding it faster, safer, and smarter than ever before. As global energy demands intensify, the need to accelerate time-to-first-barrel is no longer aspirational - it’s operationally urgent. And yet, many of the industry’s most critical workflows still rely on episodic analysis and legacy HPC silos that weren’t built for the pace of modern exploration.

From Static Snapshots to Continuous Discovery

Seismic surveys generate petabytes of subsurface data. Reservoir simulations add terabytes more. Real-time sensor telemetry streams in by the second from drilling rigs and production facilities. But these insights remain fragmented, buried in incompatible formats, or delayed by infrastructure bottlenecks. Traditional exploration pipelines result in static snapshots—a reservoir model rendered obsolete before the next well is even drilled.

Imagine if energy exploration didn’t work in bursts but as a living, intelligent system—constantly learning, evolving, and accelerating discovery.

With the VAST Data Platform and InsightEngine, that future isn’t imagined—it’s being engineered.

The AI Agents of Exploration

At the heart of the VAST InsightEngine are domain-specific AI Agents - automated, event-driven engines of insight that transform raw data into real-time operational intelligence.

These intelligent agents operate continuously, orchestrated by VAST InsightEngine, each designed to solve a distinct challenge in the exploration lifecycle:

• Seismic Interpreter AI – Accelerates interpretation of 3D seismic volumes using deep learning and transformer models, mapping faults, horizons, and subsurface anomalies in hours instead of weeks.

• Reservoir Dynamics Predictor – Uses physics-informed neural networks and AI surrogates to simulate complex flow dynamics and optimize reservoir modeling.

• Drilling Risk Assessor – Continuously analyzes high-velocity telemetry to detect stuck pipe events, kicks, and equipment failure before they happen, saving millions in Non-Productive Time (NPT).

• Exploration Prospect Mapper – Fuses seismic, remote sensing, GIS, and geochemical data to rank and prioritize drilling prospects with AI-enhanced accuracy.

• Real-Time Operations Monitor – Flags anomalies across live drilling and production streams using stream analytics, reducing incident response times from hours to seconds.

• Spatial Risk Visualizer – Generates dynamic geospatial risk layers by combining seismic overlays, drilling history, surface topography, and real-time telemetry. Supports GIS-enabled decision support for well placement, environmental safety, and terrain-aware planning.

For GIS analysts, the InsightEngine eliminates the barrier between spatial analysis, subsurface data, and real-time operational telemetry—enabling map-based workflows to evolve into continuously learning, location-aware intelligence. With the VAST DataBase indexing both spatial and vector embeddings side by side, geospatial queries can now surface not just coordinates, but operational insight.

These agents don’t just automate tasks—they learn from every well drilled, every seismic survey, and every operational decision. They improve with each iteration, creating a self-reinforcing flywheel of exploration intelligence.

The Technical Blueprint: Engineering Intelligence at Scale

The VAST InsightEngine is made possible by an architecture that redefines how data is stored, accessed, analyzed, and acted upon:

• VAST DataStore – All-flash, exabyte-scale storage with sub-millisecond latency, eliminating I/O bottlenecks in seismic and simulation workloads

• VAST DataSpace – A unified global namespace spanning edge, core, and cloud, breaking down geographic and protocol silos

• VAST DataBase – Query across structured, unstructured, spatial, and vector data without ETL. Now exploration data and geological reports are searchable together

• VAST DataEngine – Brings compute to the data with in-place containerized execution, dramatically reducing latency and infrastructure sprawl

• VAST InsightEngine – Automates AI pipelines, tracks lineage, and triggers AI agents the moment new data lands. This is where automation meets intelligence

Together, these systems create a platform that learns—an infrastructure where data doesn’t sit still but evolves with every event.

Real-World Impact: From Data to Drilling Decisions

Example 1: Prospect De-Risking in Days, Not Months A high-resolution 3D seismic survey lands in the VAST DataStore. Instantly, InsightEngine triggers the Seismic Interpreter AI. Faults and facies are mapped. That output feeds the Reservoir Dynamics Predictor. In place, thousands of surrogate simulations run. What used to take months of manual work now happens in a matter of days—with uncertainty quantified and confidence measured.

Example 2: Preventing the Unpredictable While drilling, real-time MWD/LWD telemetry is ingested and contextualized. The Drilling Risk Assessor detects torque and pressure anomalies and correlates them against thousands of past events. Within seconds, it issues a stuck pipe alert and suggests parameter adjustments—averting disaster.

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re blueprints, executed in production-ready environments where AI doesn’t just analyze data, it reshapes the exploration lifecycle.

The Energy Discovery Flywheel

This is more than a new workflow; it’s a new paradigm. The 'Energy Discovery Flywheel'  is a closed-loop intelligence system built on VAST, where:

• Every seismic dataset trains better interpreters

• Every well drilled refines risk models

• Every production stream tunes dynamic simulators

It’s a flywheel that spins faster with every data point, accelerating from exploration to development to production—and back again.

AI Agents don’t just automate decisions—they learn from success and failure alike, building smarter models and improving the odds of the next prospect.

Redefining Exploration Infrastructure

Legacy HPC systems were built for simulations, not intelligence. Separate clusters for seismic, reservoir modeling, and analytics result in data movement, latency, and cost. VAST replaces this patchwork with a unified, intelligent platform where:

• AI runs where the data lives

• ETL pipelines disappear

• Seismic, GIS, telemetry, and production data coexist in one fabric

• Real-time decisions are not just possible - they’re expected

It’s a shift from brittle pipelines to resilient, adaptive exploration.

Enabling Real-Time Transformation

VAST InsightEngine enables faster insight delivery, earlier risk detection, and scalable AI agent deployment—all within a unified architecture. Exploration teams benefit from streamlined workflows, accelerated simulation pipelines, and tighter collaboration between geoscientists, data scientists, and engineers.

These aren’t just technology improvements—they’re strategic enablers that enhance agility, safety, and operational excellence at every stage of the energy discovery lifecycle.

The New Standard for Energy AI

The age of batch-mode exploration is over.

This is the era of continuous discovery—where the line between exploration, analysis, and action is erased.

With VAST, the infrastructure doesn’t just support innovation—it accelerates it. A VAST InsightEngine for Energy is within reach. And it holds the potential to transform how we power the planet.

Imagine if your infrastructure didn’t just process the past… but predicted the future. With VAST, it can.

What’s stopping your team from adopting a continuous discovery model today? Is it infrastructure, data, culture—or something else? Join the conversation on Cosmos.