Event Advocacy
ADIPEC 2025: Event Advocacy and Technology Scouting
Four days of event advocacy and technology scouting at ADIPEC 2025 in Abu Dhabi, combining pre-event awareness, on-site interviews, demonstrations and social content with post-event analysis around AI, autonomous operations, robotics and the future of energy.
Image: Kevin O'DonovanADIPEC is one of those events where the first challenge is simply working out where to focus. More than 200,000 people were expected in Abu Dhabi for four days covering pretty much every corner of the energy industry, and the 2025 theme — “Energy. Intelligence. Impact.” — made it fairly clear that AI and digitalisation were going to be front and centre.
The work started before I arrived. I used the run-up to the event to look at the agenda, the companies and technologies I wanted to explore, and to start the conversation around what I would be watching. Once on site, the aim was not to try to cover everything. It was to follow the areas that interested me most — Industrial AI, autonomous operations, robotics, digital twins and the increasingly close relationship between energy infrastructure and the AI ecosystem.
Across the four days I recorded conversations and interviews with people from a range of organisations, including NVIDIA, ABB, Yokogawa, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Utilidata and Global Maritime. Some conversations focused on where AI and Agentic AI were heading, others on robotics and autonomous facilities, and others on the practical challenge of connecting all of these technologies to existing industrial operations. There were also plenty of demonstrations and shorter conversations that became posts and clips during and after the event.
One of the advantages of covering an event this way is that patterns start to emerge across conversations that initially look unrelated. Autonomous operations became the standout theme for me. Yokogawa was talking about the journey from industrial automation to industrial autonomy, ABB about the different levels at which processes can realistically become autonomous, and similar themes appeared across several of the other companies I spoke with. AI, agents, robotics, operational data and digital twins were increasingly being discussed as parts of the same problem rather than separate technologies.
The work continued after everyone left Abu Dhabi. I pulled the recurring themes together into a longer set of ADIPEC takeaways, including the push towards autonomous operations and what I described as the “Energy Addition” story — the reality that AI factories, electrification, reshoring, manufacturing and wider economic growth are all adding to the demand placed on energy generation and grids.
For me, this is another side of Event Advocacy. Sometimes the job is centered on one organization; at an event such as ADIPEC it can also be about navigating a very large industry gathering, finding the conversations worth having, connecting ideas across different companies and then turning four very busy days into a body of content and an outside-in perspective that remains useful after the exhibition closes.
