The Digital Revolution Will Not Wait for Oil & Gas

 Officers and directors of North American producer firms may soon find the pressure to act becoming impossible to ignore. For years, I have argued that the industry’s financial performance has been inadequate. Now a larger question is emerging: can the industry finance and deliver the energy the continent will need?

The expectations are growing. So is the distance between those expectations and an industry culture that remains committed to muddling through.

Some of the most candid criticism is coming from Canada, where distance to market, transportation costs and heavy-oil quality differentials can compound producers’ financial challenges. These circumstances demand a stronger commercial response. Instead, the familiar explanation persists: government prevents the industry from accomplishing what it otherwise would.

The government has plenty to answer for. So do officers and directors.

“We’re Not Running Fast Enough”

In a recent interview, Enbridge CEO Greg Ebel warned that Canada must move faster to compete for investment. His assessment was blunt: “we better run faster, and we’re not running fast enough.” He pointed to the relative attractiveness of American investment opportunities and the need for Canadian policies that support development. Enbridge interview.

His criticism is directed principally at the government. I hear a message for producers as well.

The United States has its own regulatory conflicts, infrastructure constraints and political obstacles. Those difficulties have hardly disappeared. Yet Ebel’s comparison exposes the commercial question Canada keeps avoiding: what must change here to make investment worthwhile?

People, Ideas & Objects has consistently argued that North American oil & gas needs to establish profitability throughout its production profile. The capacity to produce another barrel or another unit of natural gas tells us very little about whether producing it creates value, recovers the capital consumed and finances the industry’s future.

That distinction becomes decisive when the discussion turns to the Digital Revolution.

Governments, utilities and think tanks are beginning to describe the energy system they believe the future requires. Producers should be leading the commercial response. Too often, they appear to be waiting for someone else to remove every obstacle before they reconsider how their own businesses operate.

Enbridge has the scale and geographic reach to pursue opportunities elsewhere. Canadian producers should consider what happens when the capital and infrastructure they need follow those opportunities.

If the message still fails to register, no one should be surprised. At times, the Canadian industry appears almost comatose.

Before Declaring a Market Failure

The argument has become more pointed in Alberta, where a leaked cabinet report reportedly described TC Energy’s plans for its NOVA Gas Transmission Ltd. system as “misaligned” with anticipated demand. It also alleged a “market failure” that left important growth regions unable to access natural gas. The concerns included potential demand from AI data centres, oil sands projects and other industrial development. CBC report

I find the assignment of responsibility incomplete.

A regulated pipeline business needs a commercial foundation for expansion. Producers and customers must translate their expectations into credible requirements and commitments. The pipeline operator must develop projects, secure approvals and arrange financing. Someone ultimately has to support the cost of the capacity being requested.

A government forecast of future demand does not, by itself, accomplish any of that.

Nor would it be accurate to suggest the NGTL system has stood still. TC Energy reports approximately $15 billion of investment in the system over the past decade and continues to advance expansion projects. The dispute concerns whether the location, timing and scale of planned capacity will meet emerging needs. TC Energy’s NGTL system overview

That is a more useful starting point. Which projects need service? When do they need it? What commitments have been offered? Where does the process break down, and who is responsible for resolving it?

Those questions place producers, industrial customers, pipeline operators and governments within the same commercial discussion. Simply identifying the pipeline company as the failure risks allowing everyone else to escape scrutiny.

If Alberta expects an extraordinary expansion of energy demand, it needs an equally serious account of how that demand becomes financeable infrastructure and profitable production.

Who Is Paying?

On September 2, I responded on X to the Fraser Institute’s Strategies to Secure Canadian Energy Sovereignty. The paper advocates export diversification, additional infrastructure and changes to the policies affecting energy investment. Its authors emphasize creating conditions that attract capital. The authors’ summary

My frustration concerns the industry’s habit of treating another government strategy as the answer to its own commercial failures.

Are we back to five-year economic plans? The Soviet echoes become difficult to ignore whenever executives spend decades explaining why the government prevents them from acting, then expect the government to organize their future.

Investors’ demands for profitability and accountability should never have been difficult to understand. In my view, their retreat beginning in 2015 delivered a verdict that the industry has still failed to absorb.

Losing investor confidence is like having your engine seize on the way to your vacation. You can keep gripping the steering wheel, but you are going nowhere. Eleven years later, too many officers and directors still appear to be sitting behind that wheel, pretending to hurtle down the highway.

Now the government is supposed to draw up a strategy and make everything happen?

With whose capital? Whose resources? Supported by what underlying profitability?

Private capital can finance substantial development when investors can see credible returns. That is precisely why the industry’s ability to earn those returns matters. If producers cannot explain how their ambitions will generate value, transferring the discussion to Ottawa does nothing to resolve the underlying failure.

Call this self-serving gibberish if you like. Before celebrating another strategy, answer the question industry and government keep stepping around:

Who is paying for all this, and what profitable activity will sustain the investment?

That was the substance of my September 2 post. The question remains.

Energy and the Digital Revolution

Two developments offer a more constructive view of what could come next.

The first is Professor Philip Zelikow’s Hoover Institution presentation, American Energy: The Key to Success in the Digital Revolution. In less than six minutes, he connects the foundations of American industrial success with the requirements of the emerging digital economy. Watch the presentation

His historical argument brings together resource abundance, engineering talent, workforce education and an enabling political environment. Those capabilities allowed the United States to turn its natural endowment into industrial strength.

He then identifies three essential dimensions of the Digital Revolution: hardware, software and energy.

That third dimension should command the attention of everyone in oil & gas. Chips and software require a physical system capable of supplying the energy that makes them useful. Resource abundance creates an opportunity to build that system. Realizing the opportunity requires investment, infrastructure, technical capability and execution.

I recommend watching the presentation and following the Hoover Institution’s George P. Shultz Energy Policy Working Group.

My conclusion is straightforward. Energy will help determine which economies can realize the benefits of the Digital Revolution. Oil & gas producers have an opportunity to make a substantial contribution. They also have an obligation to demonstrate that they can sustain it commercially.

When governments and think tanks are articulating the opportunity, while governments and pipeline companies argue over the capacity to serve it, producer leadership should be unmistakable.

Where is it?

Brick by Brick and Stick by Stick

Consider Alberta and California as two different expressions of economic opportunity. Alberta possesses an extraordinary energy resource base. California has built a concentration of information technology businesses and expertise closely associated with the development of Artificial Intelligence.

Both illustrate the importance of turning resources, knowledge and investment into productive activity.

For Alberta, the relevant question is how effectively its resource wealth becomes enduring economic value. Calling energy an economic engine is easy. Keeping that engine productive, profitable and capable of financing its next stage of development requires considerably more.

I have argued for rebuilding this industry “brick by brick and stick by stick.” The emerging demands make that proposition increasingly difficult to dismiss.

The “muddle through” culture consumes attention, capital and time merely maintaining itself. Attempting to build the capabilities required for the Digital Revolution within that culture could absorb the very resources needed to move forward.

People, Ideas & Objects Synallagi, our user community and their service providers offer the basis for a different approach: reserves preservation, performance and profitability.

That means developing the information and operating capabilities through which producers can understand the economics of their properties, recover their capital and make independent decisions about when production creates value. It means treating profitability as the commercial foundation of reliable supply.

An industry expected to support a major expansion of economic activity must be capable of financing its own continuing contribution.

The Value Still in the Ground

The second constructive development concerns investment.

On April 7, 2025, I published Oil & Gas Arbitrage: The Market Finds a Way. The argument examined the opportunity to acquire oil & gas assets during periods of weak commodity prices and preserve exposure to their longer-term value. Read the paper

There are two related sources of potential gain.

First, higher realized prices can increase the expected future net cash flows from an existing reserve base. Because costs do not necessarily rise in proportion to revenue, the effect on value can be substantial. Its magnitude depends on the asset’s costs, production profile, development requirements, fiscal terms and the duration of the price improvement. The upside can be substantial: under the right cost and valuation assumptions, even a 10% increase in commodity prices could double an investment’s value.

Second, a stronger price outlook can make additional volumes economic to recover. Under the applicable technical and commercial criteria, that can support an increase in estimated reserves.

The geology has not changed. The economic boundary of what can be developed has.

Natural gas that cannot justify development at one price may become commercially attractive at a substantially higher price. The investor can therefore benefit from both improved economics on existing reserves and the potential development of additional resources.

Those additional volumes still require capital and execution. Their value depends on the producer’s ability to develop and operate them profitably. Reserves estimates, economic valuations and the accounting carrying value of an asset are also distinct measures.

This is why preserving the resource and improving the business that manages it belong in the same investment argument.

On September 14, Carlyle-backed Avenrock Energy announced an agreement to acquire Parallax Energy, establishing a new Western Canadian light-oil platform focused on Alberta’s East Shale Duvernay. The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Carlyle’s announcement identifies long-duration resources and improving market access among the region’s attractions. Carlyle announcement

I see that investment as consistent with the broader opportunity described in my paper. Carlyle’s own rationale stands on its announcement.

Acquiring the assets establishes the opportunity. Operating them profitably determines how much of that opportunity becomes lasting value.

The Digital Revolution is raising the stakes. The resource exists. Capital is making choices. Officers and directors need to decide whether they will continue defending the culture that brought us here or begin building the capabilities the future requires.

Now is the time to start the development of Synallagi.

Consider This... AI is the Killer App of IP

A technical glitch (user based) left this in Monday's spot for publication, as draft. It is the last post of this series and is not out of sequence by publishing it today.

 Artificial Intelligence: Intellectual Property as the Killer App

George Sivulka, CEO of Hebbia, made an important distinction in this presentation:

• Individual Artificial Intelligence breeds chaos.
• Institutional Artificial Intelligence fosters coordination.

Isolated AI produces answers or actions, while institutional AI produces governed orchestration. Consider the number of AI Agents that may soon be operating within a producer firm. What types of Agents will they be? Who will authorize them? What information will they be permitted to access? What will they be expected to produce, and who will be accountable for the consequences?

AI Agents deployed independently throughout an organization represent the individual Artificial Intelligence Sivulka described. Each Agent may appear useful in isolation, yet collectively they can circumvent established processes, duplicate existing capabilities, produce conflicting information, and introduce considerably more risk than value.

The resulting questions are not theoretical.

• Was an AI Agent granted the database access it required, or was its usefulness limited by incomplete access? Did it obtain information beyond what was authorized? Is its output accurate, complete, and relevant? Can the result be recreated consistently? Is there an authoritative source against which it can be validated?
• What happens when an existing system presents more comprehensive and trustworthy information? Which result is correct? Which is reliable? If the two presentations are inconsistent, can either one be trusted?
• That is not coordination. It is managed chaos—assuming it is managed at all.

From Individual AI to Institutional AI

Institutional Artificial Intelligence does not mean merely providing every employee with access to the same AI platform. It means placing Artificial Intelligence within a defined operating environment governed by established authority, business processes, information structures, security, accountability, and Intellectual Property.

Before an AI Agent is permitted to act, the institution must be able to answer:

Who authorized the Agent?

What business purpose is it authorized to serve?

Which information may it access?

What transactions or processes may it initiate?

Which decisions may it support, recommend, or make?

How will its actions and sources be recorded?

Can its output be reproduced and independently verified?

Who reviews exceptions, errors, conflicts, and unintended consequences?

Who remains accountable for the result?

Without these answers, an AI Agent is not an institutional capability. It is an individual experiment operating inside a commercial organization.

That distinction becomes particularly important when Artificial Intelligence is introduced into accounting, administration, operations, and Joint Operating Committee activities. Will an AI Agent’s output be accepted for regulatory purposes? Will other members of the Joint Operating Committee rely upon it? Can its calculations be proven? If proving the result requires someone to reconstruct the entire analysis manually, what efficiency has the Agent actually created?

If the output is not sufficiently reliable for regulatory, contractual, accounting, or operational purposes, is it limited to supporting decisions? If so, what kinds of decisions? Surely consequential strategic or operational decisions cannot be based upon information whose authority, completeness, and reproducibility remain uncertain.

Artificial Intelligence is too valuable to be deployed without these determinations.

Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Substitute for Information Architecture

AI Agents, Palantir, Databricks, and similar technologies are increasingly treated as essential items that corporations must be able to mention to investors. Technology history contains no shortage of products and movements adopted as evidence that an organization was operating at the frontier—only to be replaced or forgotten shortly afterward.

Artificial Intelligence should not become another corporate fashion.

Its greatest value is not in gathering poorly organized data from incompatible systems and presenting management with a collection of possible answers. Search engines have been locating, aggregating, and organizing vast quantities of information for decades. Artificial Intelligence can do considerably more, but only when the underlying information and business architecture permit it.

The more important question is why existing oil & gas systems cannot prepare the required financial and operational information today.

Has the data been captured in its primary form? Is it properly normalized and organized within an appropriate database? Has the industry become dependent upon aggregated information because the original operational detail was never retained? Have management and operational accounting fallen behind financial reporting because the systems lack the information necessary to support them?

There is no technical reason for this condition to continue.

Field data capture, Internet of Things devices, automated processes, and transaction-level information can provide more complete, accurate, and timely financial and operational data. Artificial Intelligence can then operate upon that foundation. It should not be expected to compensate for the absence of one.

AI applied to poorly structured information may produce an answer faster. It does not necessarily produce the correct answer.

Artificial Intelligence Within a Transaction-Focused ERP

Synallagi (The Greek word for Transaction.) is a transaction-focused Enterprise Resource Planning system. Artificial Intelligence introduced into this environment can provide substantial benefits, including improved analysis, automation, exception management, planning, coordination, and Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration.

It also creates consequential risks.

A producer’s responsibility does not disappear merely because an Artificial Intelligence system initiated a transaction, issued a request, prepared a purchase order, generated a Work Order, or performed another automated or autonomous action. The organization must continue to govern the authority, purpose, limits, and consequences of every action undertaken through its systems.

This creates a distinct challenge for future Enterprise Resource Planning systems. Artificial Intelligence must be capable of operating with greater autonomy while remaining subject to defined commercial authority, business rules, security, verification, and accountability.

If Synallagi appears complex, it is because these complexities already exist within the oil & gas business. Synallagi addresses them directly through software and through the specialized service provider organizations established by our user community. That software and those services are People, Ideas & Objects’ response to the operational difficulty of the industry and the technological capabilities society now demands.

Ignoring these risks would be foolish. Preventing Artificial Intelligence from creating value because the risks were never addressed would be equally so.

Intellectual Property as the Institutional Framework

Artificial Intelligence requires more than data and computing capacity. It requires defined knowledge, authority, processes, relationships, limitations, and expected outcomes.

That is the role of Intellectual Property.

Intellectual Property provides the guidelines, guardrails, frameworks, security, and operating definitions governing who may do what, where, when, why, and how. It establishes what an AI-enabled process is intended to accomplish, what it is prohibited from doing, and the conditions under which its output may be accepted.

Licensing our user community and their service provider organizations ensures that the Artificial Intelligence they deploy through Synallagi performs the functionality expected and authorized within their licensed areas. The applicable Intellectual Property defines the process management embedded in the software and the authority under which that process operates.

There is no more and no less.

Within Synallagi, Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence have a bidirectional operational relationship:

Intellectual Property provides the business models, process definitions, knowledge, authority, and constraints upon which Artificial Intelligence operates.

Artificial Intelligence applies, extends, and operationalizes that Intellectual Property through analysis, automation, coordination, and autonomous activity.

Intellectual Property is therefore both the fuel and the guardrails for Artificial Intelligence.

This is how individual Artificial Intelligence becomes institutional Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence combined with Intellectual Property makes Orchestration both possible and operational.

Intellectual Property Organizes People

Intellectual Property is not merely a technology asset. It is a means of organizing people around defined knowledge, rights, responsibilities, and commercial purposes.

Copyright protection reflects a principle embedded in the United States Constitution: progress is encouraged when people have recognized rights in the works and ideas they create. Those rights allow knowledge to be developed, protected, licensed, commercialized, and distributed through durable organizational structures.

Intellectual Property will retain its value for as long as people continue to have bad ideas, good ideas, ridiculous ideas, brilliant ideas, and ideas whose value becomes apparent only after years of work.

Artificial Intelligence does not diminish the importance of those ideas. It increases the speed and scale at which they can be tested, refined, implemented, and distributed.

Much of the increase in the Western world’s standard of living can be attributed to specialization and the division of labor described by Adam Smith. Successive generations have found better ways to provide products and services faster, at higher quality, and at lower cost. Steam engines, internal-combustion engines, moving assembly lines, automation, software, and now Artificial Intelligence have extended that process.

The enduring source of progress, however, is not the tool alone. It is the organization of people and knowledge around productive purposes.

One of corporate America’s less-discussed weaknesses is its tendency to accumulate knowledge within organizational silos until that knowledge becomes inaccessible, commercially unusable, or obsolete. Artificial Intelligence, software, and new organizational models make those silos increasingly vulnerable.

Engineers and geologists no longer require the institutional scale of established producers to develop sophisticated operating capabilities. New producers can be formed around specialized knowledge, clearly defined Intellectual Property, software, Artificial Intelligence, and algorithms. With the appropriate commercial and organizational structure, these scientists can outperform larger competitors burdened by outdated ideas, systems and methods.

The reset is already underway—from organizations that hoard knowledge to individuals and communities capable of converting knowledge into operating capability.

Synallagi as an Institutional Environment

People, Ideas & Objects established Intellectual Property as one of Synallagi three principal competitive advantages. Our user community and our research are the other two.

Over the past several decades, Intellectual Property has enabled us to establish a distinct position within the Enterprise Resource Planning industry. It provides North American oil & gas with a structure, business model, plan, vision, method of addressing its persistent difficulties, and competitive framework of enduring value.

The details of what works and what does not will be determined by our user community during development. The broader institutional environment, however, is already defined through Synallagi’s nine Organizational Constructs, the seven frameworks of the Joint Operating Committee, its eleven modules, Oracle Cloud ERP, and the body of Intellectual Property governing their relationships.

Together, these components establish a shared direction.

When someone within the oil & gas industry asks how a particular activity should be undertaken, that person should be able to understand intuitively where the work belongs, which authority governs it, what information it requires, and how the need should be communicated to others operating within the same environment.

That common understanding is institutional coordination.

The Killer App

In the early 1980s, people purchased personal computers without knowing what practical purpose they would serve. Asked what they intended to do with them, many offered the same answer: store recipes.

Businesses were equally uncertain. A departmental personal computer might be shared among ten people and then carefully dusted each evening while providing little material value.

Lotus 1-2-3 changed that. The spreadsheet gave the personal computer an immediate, compelling commercial purpose. Word processing followed, and the expensive electronic recipe holder became an indispensable business tool. The term “killer app” came to describe the application that made the underlying technology essential.

Artificial Intelligence is now searching for its killer app.

Within Synallagi, that killer app is Intellectual Property licensing to our user community and their service provider organizations.

Our Intellectual Property licensing architecture gives Artificial Intelligence a defined commercial purpose. It determines what knowledge may be used, which processes may be performed, who may authorize them, what limitations apply, how responsibility is allocated, and where the resulting value belongs.

These mechanisms constrain risky or unbounded behaviour while enabling the desired degree of analysis, controlled automation, and Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration.

Artificial Intelligence is a powerful new animal with multiple personalities. It can produce extraordinary value when applied appropriately and for authorized purposes. It can enter areas of consequential impact without sufficient forethought. It can also be used in ways that are plainly inappropriate.

Society has never before placed tools this powerful, affordable, and broadly available into the hands of so many people.

The difference between chaos and coordination will not be Artificial Intelligence itself. It will be the Intellectual Property, authority, architecture, and institutional discipline within which Artificial Intelligence is permitted to operate.

Artificial Intelligence + Intellectual Property, Makes Orchestration Possible and Operational. 

1. Constraining Abilities and Behaviors

Intellectual Property considerations impose hard and soft limits:

Access controls, segregation of duties, and sensitivity tiers: Synallagi permission models treat valuable IP as protected assets. AI inherits the same constraints as our user community and service providers; AI cannot elevate privileges or combine roles in ways that would violate IP-protection or embedded compliance policies dictate.

These constraints keep AI from becoming an unbounded actor operating in unknown and unconstrained ways within producers, Joint Operating Committees or other organizations Synallagi may be operational.

2. Harnessing Behaviors Through Intellectual Property-Grounded Guidance

Orchestration aligned to IP domains: Synallagi operates within scoped knowledge and tool access that mirrors the IP and Joint Operating Committees are organized. Orchestration enforces high-level business intent while remaining inside their IP-defined boundaries.

3. Enabling Controlled Automation and Desired Asynchronous Autonomy

The same Intellectual Property-centric controls that constrain the system also create safe operating envelopes for autonomy:

Risk-tiered human-in-the-loop: Routine, low-risk tasks can run fully autonomously. High-stakes actions involving large commitments, decisions, allocations or data sharing will trigger configurable thresholds that route to human approval or dual-control. Any proposed write or external action is checked against IP-protection policies, monetary limits, categorical rules, and anomaly detectors before execution.

Auditability and reversibility: Full logging of AI decisions, data accessed, and actions taken supports both operational control and later IP enforcement (e.g., proving independent development or detecting leakage).

Intellectual Property supplies both the distinctive knowledge that makes the AI valuable inside Synallagi and the legal and technical boundaries that keep it focused and accountable. The result is automation and autonomous behavior that is powerful enough to deliver the “killer-app” productivity gains while remaining inside the enterprise’s desired control surface. Without these IP-defined definitions and constraints, Artificial Intelligence becomes less useful and unacceptably risky.

Intellectual Property gives Artificial Intelligence something authoritative to know. Artificial Intelligence gives Intellectual Property the capacity to reason. Orchestration gives both the ability to act.

Conclusion

The next generation of Enterprise Resource Planning systems is being built today. North American oil & gas will participate in this environment in one form or another. The question is whether the people who will develop, operate, and depend upon these systems will build what they need for themselves—or accept whatever the status quo chooses to provide.

The choice is between an institutional system such as Synallagi and an alternative best compared to the Department of Motor Vehicles: centralized, procedural, slow to change, and more committed to preserving its processes than improving the results of those required to use them.

Persistence may be the one attribute current producers have working in their favour. They will continue to “muddle through.” How they will do so is increasingly difficult to understand. The commercial world has changed direction, while the industry’s unresolved problems become more restrictive, expensive, and crippling each day. As producer risks increase, the responsibilities, rewards, and opportunities available to individuals diminish, while the explanations offered by officers and directors become more elaborate.

Persistence is not a strategy.

If a 1920s vision of organizational efficiency is considered adequate for the 2020s and beyond, then “muddle through” remains the appropriate choice. Synallagi offers a different vision: markets and producers organized through the Joint Operating Committee, supported by our user community, specialized service provider organizations and an Enterprise Resource Planning architecture capable of adapting continuously to changing commercial conditions.

For individuals deciding where to invest their careers, knowledge, and future, the contrast could not be more stark.

Artificial Intelligence will intensify that choice. It is a remarkable technology whose eventual consequences may exceed anything we presently anticipate. Will it produce changes comparable to another Industrial Revolution? Almost certainly.

Its low cost, accessibility, and ease of use will place extraordinary capabilities in the hands of individuals and institutions alike. That prospect conflicts directly with organizations satisfied with a century-old operating model. Those organizations nevertheless retain one considerable advantage: they control most of the industry’s institutional and financial resources today.

They have also observed what happened to industries that were disintermediated, reorganized, or as we describe them, “refactored their organizational charts” before them. They have learned how to defend their authority and preserve their position. We should expect them to use the resources they control to do so.

The means through which individuals maintain their independence—from both DMV-style institutions and Artificial Intelligence controlled by others—is Intellectual Property. More precisely, it is enforceable access to Intellectual Property, clearly defined licensed authority, and the ability to convert knowledge into operating software and commercial capability.

Our user community can define what it knows to be accurate, embody that knowledge in Synallagi, and apply the resulting capabilities throughout the industry. Its members can then combine Synallagi’s explicit knowledge with the tacit knowledge accumulated within their service provider organizations, benefiting both producers and themselves.

That is the Synallagi vision: unified Intellectual Property ownership supporting distributed authority, innovation, specialization, and commercial independence.

It is a compelling alternative to the DMV model. It is also a choice each individual must make. For my part, I am grateful that I made that decision long ago.

This installment of the Consider This… series of papers has described Artificial Intelligence as the killer application of Intellectual Property. Possessing Intellectual Property has always been valuable, but the practical question remained: what are you going to do with it?

For years, Synallagi was stored in a database originally used for recipes. The Intellectual Property existed, but its ability to act remained limited. Artificial Intelligence changes that. It can interpret, apply, extend, and operationalize Intellectual Property at a speed and scale that were previously impossible.

The relationship is reciprocal. Artificial Intelligence makes Intellectual Property dynamic; Intellectual Property gives Artificial Intelligence its form, structure, purpose, authority, and limitations.

Without that structure, organizations may attempt to manage their risk by restricting the number of AI Agents they deploy and containing the fallout when those Agents produce conflicting information or exceed their authority. That is not an institutional solution. It is merely limiting the amount of chaos.

Within an oil & gas Enterprise Resource Planning environment, Artificial Intelligence must operate through defined business processes, authorized information access, verifiable results, accountable transactions, and enforceable Guardrails. Intellectual Property provides those conditions. It turns Artificial Intelligence from a powerful but unbounded tool into a reliable institutional capability suitable for financial, administrative, and operational use.

People, Ideas & Objects’ Synallagi—together with Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration, our user community, and their service provider organizations—provides that institutional solution for North American oil & gas producers.

Synallagi is wrapped within an Intellectual Property framework that enables producers to meet emerging challenges, realize new opportunities, and eliminate persistent, systemic, and financially damaging problems. It aligns technology, knowledge, authority, motivation, and accountability within a coherent commercial architecture.

The result is what we describe as "A New Discipline" for oil & gas.

It is founded upon a revised culture of reserves preservation, performance, and profitability. It enables producers to increase their speed, capabilities, capacity, success, and achievements as the marketplace changes. Most importantly, it reduces Organizational Latency—the time between recognizing an opportunity, determining what must be done, developing the required capability, and achieving a successful result—to a fraction of what it is today.

The future is being built now. The only remaining question is who will build it—and for whose benefit. People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations have the Intellectual Property in the form of Synallagi with Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration. Intellectual Property gives Artificial Intelligence something authoritative to know. Artificial Intelligence gives Intellectual Property the capacity to reason. Orchestration gives both the ability to act. 

Artificial Intelligence Is the “Killer App” of Intellectual Property—Making Orchestration Both Possible and Operational.

Debate # 41, AI + IP = Orchestration

 Consider This… AI + IP = Orchestration — The Debate

I’ll begin with the usual caveat: producing these podcasts can feel like herding 100 cats into the same room. Some compromises are inevitable, and at a certain point we publish what we have. The presenters’ ever-changing pronunciation of Synallagi captures the challenge perfectly. Their first attempt is almost correct—a hopeful start—before things deteriorate, rather comically, as the debate progresses.

One substantive correction is necessary. Towards the end, the presenters confuse our user community with our developers, using the terms interchangeably when discussing the Targeting Framework. Throughout this podcast, references to “developers” should be understood to mean our user community.

The compensation system we have specified applies to our user community and their service provider organizations. Our primary development work is with Oracle, with the objective of delivering Synallagi as quickly and to the highest standard as possible. People, Ideas & Objects’ developers and other employees receive standard competitive salaries.

In addition, we levy a 15% assessment on income generated by the user community through the Targeting Framework to fund our employee bonus system. This aligns our employees’ interests with those of the user community and service providers. Because our work supports development across Synallagi, the bonus system connects that broad contribution to the success of the community as a whole.

We do not have a share option plan. Given the specialized market for an oil and gas ERP provider, we question whether a future public listing would offer a meaningful basis for employee compensation. A bonus system tied to the Targeting Framework provides a more practical means of rewarding employees for helping the user community advance and bringing the entire project to completion.

With that distinction established, the debate offers another useful way into the Consider This… AI + IP = Orchestration paper. Sometimes, getting 90% of what you want means accepting a few imperfections—and correcting the ones that matter. We are building a substantial library of Synallagi content, and I find these podcasts an effective way to catch up quickly and appreciate the breadth of what we are developing.

Consider This... AI is the Killer App of IP

 Guardrails

The Synallagi Targeting Framework will be examined comprehensively in a forthcoming paper within our 21st Century Marketplace Vision series. For this paper's purposes, it is sufficient to establish the guardrails within which it must operate.

The Targeting Framework is intended to identify, evaluate, monetize, and distribute a portion of the incremental benefits generated through the knowledge, skills, experience, expertise, ideas, and innovative capabilities of our user community. These benefits may arise from reduced costs, increased revenues, improved productivity, better business processes, or entirely new operating capabilities developed by our user community and enabled through our software developers.

In a directly related matter. Intellectual Property as discussed to this point forms the foundation of what is and what is not undertaken within the producer firm and oil & gas industry through Synallagi. Where in fact Artificial Intelligence is the “Killer App” that makes Intellectual Properties value realized. And as we will see in this paper AI plus IP makes Orchestration both possible and operational. 

Guardrails: Protecting Value, Trust and Architectural Integrity

A seemingly insignificant improvement—such as a recurring $0.25 reduction in cost or increase in revenue—may mean little to an individual producer. Applied repeatedly across the 1.1 to 1.3 million producing wells in North America, however, that same improvement could create substantial industry value. The Targeting Framework would determine the portion of that value attributable to an innovation and support the distribution of an agreed derivative share to our user community members and service provider organizations responsible for creating, implementing, and sustaining it.

The framework cannot be permitted to assess its own success subjectively. A permanent base case of industry performance must be established against which subsequent developments are measured. Benefits must be calculated independently, objectively, verifiably, and consistently—both for the most recent reporting period and cumulatively from the time Synallagi becomes operational. What gets measured gets managed.

Oversight must therefore be entrusted to an independent body representing our user community, producers, and other appropriate participants. That body would govern the evaluation, calculation, monetization, allocation, distribution, administration, and arbitration of benefits. Its purpose would be to ensure that value is neither claimed without evidence nor withheld from those responsible for creating it.

This is the first guardrail: no demonstrated value, no distribution.

The second is that every innovation must operate within Synallagi’s established business models and architectural framework. A change producing an apparent benefit in one area cannot be accepted if it creates hidden costs, inconsistencies, or failures elsewhere. Synallagi is an integrated Enterprise Resource Planning architecture. Much as a building has its foundations, electrical systems, plumbing, and structural components must work together. Shortcuts taken during development will eventually be paid for by everyone who depends upon the system.

Innovation must therefore be initiated, refined, developed, tested, documented, validated, and supported before its benefits can be recognized. Errors will occur—often more frequently than solutions during the early stages of development. What matters is whether those errors are identified, understood, corrected, and converted into better methods. The objective is not the appearance of progress. The objective is completion: work that operates accurately, reliably, and consistently throughout the architecture.

The third guardrail concerns authority. Synallagi development will occur within an independent community of qualified, authorized, and licensed collaborators. Our user community will provide the business knowledge and functional direction. Software developers will provide the comprehensive technical capabilities necessary to convert those requirements into operating software. Service provider organizations will combine the explicit knowledge captured in Synallagi with the tacit knowledge accumulated through implementation, specialization, and continuing industry experience.

Each participant will have a defined role. No contributor should receive credit for value that cannot be attributed to their work, and no participant should be able to appropriate another person’s contribution. The applicable Intellectual Property, licensing, documentation, attribution, confidentiality, and derivative-work requirements will govern how innovations are developed and incorporated into Synallagi. These matters will be addressed more fully in the section that follows.

The fourth guardrail is transparency appropriate to responsibility. Synallagi should produce an industry scorecard comparing the established base case with the performance achieved after implementation. That scorecard would show the aggregate value created through the combined innovations of our user community across North American oil & gas. Each user community member would also receive a detailed accounting of the innovations attributed to them, the value those innovations generated, and the compensation earned as a result. As stated earlier what gets measured gets managed.

Transparency does not mean that confidential methods, individual contributions, proprietary information, or commercially sensitive details must be exposed publicly. It means that the calculations, decisions, and distributions must be sufficiently documented to withstand independent review.

The fifth guardrail is that compensation must remain connected to realized value. The Targeting Framework is not intended to reward ideas merely because they are novel, nor effort merely because it was expended. It is intended to reward demonstrated improvements that producers can implement and from which the industry receives measurable benefits.

This changes the basis upon which some work may be valued. Compensation has traditionally been tied to attendance, hours worked, or a defined organizational position. Synallagi creates the opportunity to compensate people for finding better methods, developing them with software developers, proving that they work, and distributing their benefits across the industry.

Artificial Intelligence will accelerate this change. Manual movement of data and repetitive calculations will increasingly disappear, while the value of judgment, domain knowledge, innovation, and effective implementation will increase. The implications for work, productivity, and compensation will be considered more fully in the Artificial Intelligence section of this paper.

These guardrails are not intended to constrain innovation. They establish the conditions under which innovation can be trusted, protected, commercialized, and distributed at scale. They align the interests of producers, our user community, service provider organizations, software developers, producer investors, bankers and the broader industry around a common result: independently verified improvements in reserves preservation, performance, and profitability.

The Targeting Framework must ultimately answer two questions:

• What measurable value has Synallagi created for North American oil & gas?
• And who is responsible for creating it?

If those questions can be answered objectively, accurately, and fairly, our user community will have more than an incentive to innovate. It will have a durable means of building businesses around its knowledge, converting individual expertise into industry-wide capability, and sharing in the value it creates.

The Tragic and Utopian Visions

In A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Thomas Sowell distinguishes between two fundamentally different understandings of human nature: the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision, also commonly described as the tragic vision and the utopian vision. The constrained vision regards human beings as permanently limited in knowledge, judgment, and virtue. The unconstrained vision considers human nature sufficiently malleable and perfectible to permit society to be deliberately remade according to an ideal design. Basic Books, Google Books.

The danger arises when a utopian vision attempts to impose a perfect outcome upon imperfect people. By discounting human limitations, competing interests, dispersed knowledge, and unintended consequences, the pursuit of perfection can produce coercion, institutional failure, and precisely the harms it was intended to eliminate.

Synallagi subscribes to the tragic—or constrained—vision. It does not assume perfect knowledge, flawless judgment, or uniformly benevolent behaviour. It therefore relies upon defined authority, distributed knowledge, incentives, accountability, measurable performance, and institutional guardrails. As the discussion below demonstrates, Synallagi is designed to work with human limitations, not to pretend they can be designed away.

Motivation: Aligning Individual Reward with Industry Value

In our January 20, 2025 paper, “Catalysts for Cultural Change: The Leadership Role of People, Ideas & Objects User Community,” we outlined a compensation model for the individuals responsible for developing, completing, and continually improving Synallagi.

The underlying principle is straightforward:

What gets measured gets managed—and what creates measurable value should be rewarded.

People, Ideas & Objects must provide sufficient motivation for our user community to bring Synallagi into operation throughout the North American oil & gas industry. That motivation cannot depend upon promises of future opportunity alone. Members must be able to support themselves while Synallagi is being developed, receive meaningful recognition for completing the work, and participate in the recurring value their innovations create after commercial release.

This requires a layered compensation model.

During development, our user community members would receive basic hourly compensation and performance-based bonuses. After commercial release, the Synallagi Targeting Framework would begin evaluating, calculating, monetizing, and distributing the recurring value created by their innovations, automations, and autonomous developments. Members would also earn revenue through their service provider organizations, including fees for managing Joint Operating Committee processes and compensation for participating in the continuing development of the processes for which they are responsible.

Each form of compensation serves a distinct purpose.

Basic Hourly Compensation

Members of our user community would receive basic compensation of $50.00 per hour for their participation throughout the software-development process. Their work would include collecting information, identifying issues, analyzing existing processes, formulating solutions, defining business requirements, testing results, and designing the organizations through which those processes will eventually be delivered.

Our user community members are not software developers and will not be expected to write code. They will have access to a dedicated software-development team capable of converting their knowledge, ideas, and functional requirements into operating software.

Their role is creative and analytical. They must determine what Synallagi needs to do, why it needs to do it, how the resulting process should operate, and whether the completed software fulfills its intended purpose.

Basic hourly compensation provides members with the means to support themselves while performing this work. It also prevents the future opportunity offered by the Targeting Framework from being used against them. People cannot reasonably be expected to accept substantial professional and financial risk while receiving nothing more than a promise of compensation after commercial release.

At the same time, hourly compensation alone cannot provide the motivation necessary to complete a project of Synallagi’s scope. It recognizes time and participation; it does not fully recognize performance, completion, innovation, or the value ultimately created.

That is the purpose of the bonus system.

Performance Bonuses

Performance bonuses would provide immediate recognition for achieving prescribed outcomes during development. They are distinct from distributions made through the Targeting Framework.

Bonuses reward the successful completion of defined work. The Targeting Framework measures and distributes a derivative share of the recurring value subsequently created by that work in the marketplace. One provides near-term compensation for performance; the other creates the potential for long-term income from realized industry value.

The bonus system must recognize that performance occurs at several levels.

Project Completion Bonuses

Individual projects would be budgeted, approved, and administered by a project owner responsible for a Synallagi module, major process, or defined area of functionality, such as the Material Balance Report or Work Order.

Each project would have established requirements for functionality, quality, accuracy, timing, documentation, testing, and integration. A Project Completion Bonus would be earned when those requirements were satisfied.

This bonus provides the additional compensation necessary for members to receive the full value of the time, judgment, and effort invested in completing a project. It supplements the basic hourly compensation received while the work is underway.

Projects may be short or long and may require both synchronous and asynchronous participation. Several projects may operate concurrently. Work that cannot be completed within its requirements may need to be reassigned, and members who repeatedly cannot meet their responsibilities may need to reconsider their continued participation.

The objective is not activity. It is completed work that functions properly within Synallagi.

Module and Major-Process Bonuses

Every Synallagi module is responsible for a defined category of functionality and process management. Each module contains numerous specialized processes, functions, information requirements, integrations, and dependencies.

Project Completion Bonuses recognize incremental accomplishments. Module and Major-Process Bonuses ensure that members also remain focused on the larger deliverable.

An individual project may satisfy its immediate requirements yet leave the overall module incomplete. Members must therefore remain attentive to how their projects combine with the work of others and whether the complete module or major process operates as intended.

Team-Based Bonuses

Synallagi cannot be developed through isolated individual contributions. Its complexity, scope, scale, and required development speed would produce incoherent results if every participant concentrated exclusively on their own work.

Team-Based Bonuses would reward coordination, shared problem-solving, cross-functional support, and successful completion of the broader Synallagi platform. These bonuses may complement—and in some circumstances exceed—individual performance bonuses because the value of an integrated Enterprise Resource Planning system depends upon the success of the whole.

Some members will focus almost exclusively on their licensed domain. Others will contribute wherever additional effort is required to move a process, module, or the complete platform through its final stages. Both forms of participation are necessary and should be recognized appropriately.

When Synallagi achieves commercial release, a final Team-Based Bonus would be distributed among those whose contributions earned participation in that result.

Commercial release would also establish the point from which the Targeting Framework begins measuring the incremental value created by subsequent innovations, automations, and autonomous developments throughout the Synallagi ecosystem.

Profitability, Innovation, and Accountability Bonuses

The objective of People, Ideas & Objects and our user community is to provide dynamic, innovative, accountable, and profitable oil & gas producers with the most profitable means of oil & gas operations—everywhere and always.

Our user community is also expected to establish a culture of reserves preservation, performance, and profitability throughout the industry.

That responsibility requires members to search continually for better methods within producer firms, Joint Operating Committees, and the broader industry. Profitability, Innovation, and Accountability Bonuses would recognize work that materially advances those objectives during development and implementation.

The purpose is to reward people for changing how work is performed, resolving persistent problems, and creating capabilities that would not otherwise exist.

Automation and Autonomous Development Bonuses

Automation and autonomous development are not one-time undertakings. They represent a continuing effort to provide better-quality services faster, more accurately, and with substantially greater efficiency.

Automation and Autonomous Development Bonuses would motivate our user community to continue identifying activities that can be simplified, automated, or performed autonomously through Synallagi. The industry benefits from those improvements through lower overhead, improved execution, greater consistency, and better use of professional knowledge.

The cost of rewarding an individual innovation becomes comparatively small when distributed across the production profile of the North American oil & gas industry. Through Synnefa.ai—Synallagi’s cloud-distribution environment—producers would share the cost of maintaining a single industry-focused Enterprise Resource Planning system in a manner comparable to the cost-sharing economics of cloud computing.

Synnefa takes its name from the Greek word for “clouds.”

From Immediate Recognition to Recurring Value

Development-stage bonuses and the Targeting Framework must not be confused.

Bonuses compensate defined performance and completion. They provide relatively immediate recognition while Synallagi is being built and brought into operation.

The Targeting Framework begins with demonstrated marketplace performance. It determines whether an innovation has created measurable value, how much value has been created, who was responsible for creating it, and what derivative share should be distributed to those contributors.

This creates a direct relationship between individual initiative and industry value.

A user community member who identifies an opportunity, works with software developers to implement it, proves that it operates successfully, and distributes it throughout the North American producer population should participate in the value created by that work. The greater the recurring benefit and the broader its application, the greater the potential long-term value to the member responsible.

Completion is therefore not merely an organizational demand. It is the point at which future value can begin to be realized.

Incomplete work cannot be implemented. Unverified work cannot be valued. Poorly integrated work cannot be distributed safely. Shortcuts that damage the architecture delay or diminish the benefits available to everyone—including those responsible for taking them.

Motivation consequently becomes one of Synallagi’s operating disciplines. Members are rewarded for completing their work accurately, supporting the work of others, protecting the integrity of the architecture, and continually seeking new value after commercial release.

Building Independent Businesses

Our user community must ultimately be independent of both Synallagi and People, Ideas & Objects as operating businesses. Members cannot build their futures upon promise and hope. They require defined areas of responsibility, durable commercial rights, and several sources of income.

Based upon each member’s knowledge, experience, contribution, and area of specialization, an appropriate Synallagi domain would be identified and licensed to them. That Intellectual Property license would provide the authority necessary to operate within the domain and prepare authorized derivative works.

The license would also grant the member the exclusive right to establish a service provider organization for that domain. Through that organization, the member could combine the explicit knowledge embodied in Synallagi with the tacit knowledge accumulated through implementation, operation, support, and continuing improvement.

Their potential compensation would therefore extend beyond hourly payments and bonuses to include:

Fees earned while participating in incremental software development.

Process-management fees charged through their service provider organization.

Performance bonuses earned during Synallagi development and implementation.

Targeting Framework distributions arising from measurable, recurring industry value.

The long-term commercial value of operating within an exclusively licensed area of Synallagi.

Profitable Production Rights represent another component of Synallagi’s funding model. These rights will be made available to members of our user community at a 15 percent discounted price when available. Their limited adoption does not establish a failure of Synallagi or of Profitable Production Rights; it reflects the continuing failure of producers to act upon the opportunities available to them.

Motivation as an Operating Principle

The compensation model is designed to balance survival, performance, completion, innovation, and long-term value.

Basic hourly compensation enables people to undertake the work. Performance bonuses reward defined achievements. Project, module, and team bonuses align individual effort with the completion of the integrated platform. The Targeting Framework allows contributors to participate in the recurring value their innovations create. Intellectual Property licensing and service provider rights enable them to convert personal expertise into enduring independent businesses.

Together, these mechanisms answer the fundamental question confronting every prospective member of our user community:

Why should I accept the risk, make the commitment, and undertake what may be the most difficult professional challenge of my career?

Because Synallagi offers more than employment. It provides an opportunity to build, own, operate, and continually improve a specialized business around the knowledge and experience that an individual has spent a career developing—and to share in the industry-wide value that knowledge creates.

Consider This... AI is the Killer App of IP

Origins and Applications of Synallagi Intellectual Property

Several events during the 1990s convinced me that the Information Technology industry’s treatment of Intellectual Property had reached a low point. Software companies—organizations whose revenues, profitability, and enterprise value depended almost entirely upon their Intellectual Property—routinely behaved as though “what’s yours is mine.”

The contradiction was unmistakable. How could a software company expect others to respect its Intellectual Property while refusing to recognize theirs? More importantly, why would customers, suppliers, or business partners choose to work with a company that did not respect their ownership rights?

Over the decades that followed, the industry gradually began to recognize this paradox. Intellectual Property has since become one of the defining assets of the modern economy.

Near the end of the twentieth century, I began asking a simple question:

What asset class would become the most valuable in the twenty-first century?

The answer became increasingly apparent. Every productive asset connected to a revenue stream would eventually be managed, at least in part, through software. Unless society intended to abandon computing and return to the abacus, software would become the operational layer governing commercial assets, consumer assets, Business Operations, and commerce itself.

That prediction has largely become reality.

Ownership of an oil & gas property, for example, is no longer sufficient to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Performance increasingly depends upon access to the software, business models, data structures, processes, and Intellectual Property that enable the property to be operated profitably.

Once that conclusion became apparent, there was no turning back.

Intellectual Property as a Competitive Advantage

The collapse of the dot-com bubble delayed our ambitions. After two unsuccessful attempts to develop oil & gas Enterprise Resource Planning systems during the 1990s, People, Ideas & Objects was re-established in May 2004.

This time, the strategy was fundamentally different. Synallagi would be built upon Intellectual Property as one of its three principal competitive advantages.

Looking back over the past two decades, that decision has proven sound. Although organizations now recognize the importance of Intellectual Property, its full value remains difficult to measure because it’s never truly complete. It evolves continuously through research, development, innovation, and practical experience.

People, Ideas & Objects has now published almost five million words. Synallagi itself is approaching half a million words and is being refined architecturally and technically in preparation for its handoff to our user community. Once that handoff occurs, the needs and experience of North American oil & gas producers will expand its detail substantially.

The present documentation is not intended to prescribe every future development. Its purpose is to establish a coherent vision and architectural foundation upon which our user community can build.

Collectively, that community will extend Synallagi far beyond anything one individual or organization could accomplish. At the same time, it must preserve our objective of providing North American oil & gas producers with the most dynamic, innovative, accountable, and profitable means of oil & gas operations.

In doing so, a culture of reserves preservation, performance, and profitability can replace today’s culture of “muddling through.”

Why Unified Ownership Is Necessary

For this vision to succeed, the Intellectual Property of Synallagi must remain under unified ownership. That ownership can then support comprehensive licensing through which every member of our user community receives access to Synallagi, the authority to prepare derivative works, and the opportunity to establish service provider organizations that combine their tacit knowledge with the explicit knowledge captured in the software.

At first glance, unified ownership might appear self-serving.

It is not. It is an organizational necessity.

If ownership of the architecture became fragmented among hundreds or thousands of individuals, organizations, and competing commercial interests, the result would be architectural inconsistency, incompatible implementations, recurring ownership disputes, and potentially the destruction of the product itself.

Most importantly, fragmentation would leave unresolved the underlying problems confronting unprofitable North American oil & gas producers.

A comprehensive industry Enterprise Resource Planning system cannot be developed through fragmented ownership of its foundational architecture. Unified ownership, combined with comprehensive licensing, solves that problem.

Every member of our user community receives licensed access to the entire body of Synallagi Intellectual Property. Contributors therefore work within a common architectural framework instead of negotiating separate rights to individual components owned by multiple parties. Their authorship and contributions are documented and attributed through established development processes, while ownership of the resulting Intellectual Property is governed by the applicable licensing and contribution agreements.

Our user community is exclusively licensed to prepare derivative works of Synallagi Intellectual Property. Initially, those derivative works must remain consistent with Synallagi’s established business models and architecture. Once the commercial platform has matured, those foundations can evolve through controlled iteration.

This discipline is essential. Premature architectural divergence in one area would create unforeseen consequences elsewhere throughout the system.

Central Ownership and Decentralized Innovation

The Intellectual Property generated through authorized derivative works is acquired by People, Ideas & Objects. Members of our user community are compensated for their knowledge, effort, and innovation. The resulting Intellectual Property is then incorporated into the central body of Synallagi and made available to every licensed member of our user community.

That creates a powerful network effect.

Suppose a member of our user community develops an innovative analytical process that requires information drawn from numerous database structures throughout Synallagi. Under our licensing model, that individual can use the complete architecture without negotiating separate commercial agreements with multiple Intellectual Property owners, software vendors, or proprietary data-model providers.

Conventional software-development documentation records the contribution, its authorship, and its relationship to the broader architecture. Innovation can proceed without unnecessary legal or commercial barriers.

Under many competing development models, developers must license proprietary data models, purchase access to software frameworks, and pay ongoing fees for particular information structures. Such an environment would make the collaborative development of Synallagi commercially impractical and time consuming. 

Our approach eliminates those obstacles.

Aggregating Intellectual Property within a unified ownership structure removes unnecessary disputes over who owns each component of the system. Individual contributions are identified, reviewed, attributed, and governed before being incorporated into the specification.

Over time, contributors will naturally develop expertise in particular business domains reflecting their experience, professional relationships, and interests. Those specializations provide an objective basis for recognizing their contributions while maintaining the integrity of the overall architecture.

This balance between centralized ownership and decentralized innovation lies at the heart of the Synallagi Intellectual Property model. It preserves a unified architectural vision while enabling thousands of individuals to develop collectively a system that no single organization could realistically build alone.

An Intellectual Property Model for Continuous Improvement

Synallagi’s ownership and licensing model is intended to maximize the value of its Intellectual Property for every participant. Producers, the service industry, our user community, and their service provider organizations all benefit from a single, coherent body of Intellectual Property that evolves continuously instead of fragmenting into competing versions and incompatible architectures.

One of the model’s greatest advantages is its ability to support the continual refinement of business processes as industry practices evolve and new opportunities emerge.

Conventional Enterprise Resource Planning systems frequently preserve existing business practices in software. Synallagi is intended to do something fundamentally different. It is designed as an adaptive platform that continually incorporates knowledge, innovation, and operational improvements from across the North American oil & gas industry.

This capability is particularly important to rebuilding investor confidence. Investors increasingly demand accountability, transparency, and sound governance from producer firms. Meeting those expectations requires more than improved reporting. It requires an evolving foundation of Intellectual Property that strengthens the financial, administrative, and operational integrity of the industry.

People, Ideas & Objects does not purchase an ownership interest in, or assume control over, the independent businesses operated by members of our user community. It licenses valuable Synallagi Intellectual Property to them for this defined commercial purpose.

Each licensee remains an independently owned and operated business. It controls its own operations and finances and assumes its own commercial risks. In exchange for access to Synallagi Intellectual Property, however, the licensee agrees that the licensed Intellectual Property, authorized derivative works, confidential information, and Synallagi-specific capabilities will not be used to develop or support competing products or services except as expressly permitted by the applicable license.

That expectation extends throughout our user community and its service provider organizations. Their responsibility is to continually improve the administrative, accounting, and operational capabilities of North American oil & gas while advancing Synallagi as the industry’s leading Enterprise Resource Planning architecture.

People, Ideas & Objects considers that responsibility to be an endless and unlimited frontier.

Authority Belongs to Our User Community

People, Ideas & Objects places its greatest emphasis on our user community because that community represents one of Synallagi three principal competitive advantages.

Through the licensing model, our user community receives the authority, tools, and organizational structure necessary to become the leading source of oil & gas accounting and administrative expertise.

Over time, we expect our user community to do more than respond to changes in the industry. We expect it to anticipate and lead them.

Its responsibility is to identify emerging business requirements, evaluate their implications, and evolve Synallagi before those requirements become critical. This represents a fundamental departure from conventional Enterprise Resource Planning systems, which have traditionally been used to preserve established business practices rather than improve them.

Our user community charter establishes three principles providing members with the authority necessary to fulfill this responsibility:

Our user community is exclusively licensed to prepare derivative works of Synallagi Intellectual Property. Anyone seeking a correction, enhancement, or new capability need only contact our user community.

Software developers are licensed to obtain business requirements and functional direction exclusively from our user community. They accept direction from no other source.

Our user community controls its own budgets and establishes its own development priorities.

Together, these principles enable our user community to engage directly with the broader North American oil & gas industry. Producers, Joint Operating Committees, service providers, engineers and geologists, accountants and administrators, employees, auditors and accounting firms, compliance, governance, security and legal advisers, investors, financial and marketplace participants, technology providers and software developers, Artificial Intelligence specialists, cybersecurity specialists, Oracle Services specialists, other secondary- and tertiary-industry participants and relevant disciplines ideas, identify emerging requirements, and propose improvements. These individuals will know precisely whom to contact when they identify an issue or opportunity, while Synallagi retains a coherent architectural vision and unified body of Intellectual Property.

Our user community evaluates those contributions, reconciles them with the overall architecture, and, where appropriate, incorporates them into Synallagi as new software capabilities and professional services.

This establishes a continuous cycle of innovation in which the industry participates directly in the evolution of its Enterprise Resource Planning platform. The specification is ecosystem-informed, user-community-led, service-provider-enabled and technologically supported.

Converting Individual Knowledge into Organizational Capability

The license granted to members of our user community includes the right to establish service provider organizations and sublicense them to implement, manage, and operate the processes those members are responsible for defining, designing, and developing.

This structure combines two forms of knowledge:

The explicit knowledge embodied in Synallagi architecture, software, business models, and documentation.

The tacit knowledge accumulated by service provider organizations through specialization, implementation, experience, and continuing interaction with the industry.

Together, these forms of knowledge can be delivered directly to North American oil & gas producers.

In this way, individual members of our user community can extend and leverage their knowledge, skills, experience, expertise, ideas and innovative capabilities through specialized organizations capable of serving the industry at scale.

The phrase “knowledge begets capability, capability begets action” captures the core philosophy of researchers Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark regarding how organizations transform abstract design theory into competitive market value. In their seminal work Design Rules: The Power of Modularity, they outline how understanding technical systems drives practical corporate execution.

The service provider sublicense is distinct from the license granted to a member of our user community. Service provider organizations do not independently receive the authority to prepare derivative works of Synallagi Intellectual Property. That authority remains exclusively with the applicable user community member, the principal of their organization.

When development or modification of a process is required, the user community member may delegate aspects of that work to the service provider organization while retaining the licensed authority and responsibility governing the resulting derivative work.

Service provider organizations nevertheless receive substantially broader rights and capabilities than those available under the End User License Agreement. Rights and capabilities necessary to leverage their knowledge, skills, experience, expertise, ideas and innovation to enable action.

The distinction is intentional.

End users are licensed to use Synallagi in conducting their oil & gas operations. Service providers are licensed to implement, operate, support, specialize in, and improve the delivery of defined Synallagi processes under the authority of the applicable member of our user community.

The result is a structured hierarchy of Intellectual Property rights and responsibilities:

People, Ideas & Objects maintains unified ownership of Synallagi Intellectual Property.

Our user community receives the exclusive licensed authority to prepare derivative works.

Service provider organizations receive sublicensed authority to commercialize and deliver specialized Synallagi processes under the authority of the applicable user community member.

Industry participants receive the rights necessary to use Synallagi through the End User License Agreement.

This structure preserves the integrity of Synallagi Intellectual Property while enabling specialization and the division of labor to develop and operate at scale.

It allows the knowledge of an individual user community member to become an enduring organizational capability. Synallagi’s explicit knowledge is combined with the service provider’s accumulating tacit knowledge, skills, experience, expertise, ideas and innovative capabilities.

Rather than constraining innovation, Synallagi Intellectual Property and licensing architecture establishes the framework through which innovation can be enabled, developed, protected, commercialized, and distributed throughout North American oil & gas.

That is one of the purposes of unified Intellectual Property ownership: not to limit participation, but to enable collaboration. The second is a recent development of equal consequence.

An Announcement, We Have Deadlines!

Publishing our deadlines gives prospective participants a clearer understanding of where Synallagi stands, what remains to be done, and the commitment required to reach its initial commercial release. Some will consider the schedule ambitious; others will regard it as too comfortable. Both perspectives have merit. The task ahead is enormous, and the pace depends first on securing the resources to undertake it.

Producers have provided none of the financial resources necessary to advance development. We are therefore at a standstill and will remain there until development funding is secured.

Our user community and its service provider organizations will represent the largest share of the people involved in building and operating Synallagi. They will not be asked to assume the financial and career risks of joining an unfunded initiative. Today, even publicly identifying as a prospective member could expose someone to ostracism and accusations of “betrayal” from producers. Before anyone commits to a career change, they must know that the financial resources required to complete development are available.

If producers cannot provide the resources necessary to support their recovery from the circumstances they have created, then either our hypothesis is wrong or their officers and directors are too conflicted to act. In either case, prospective members of our user community should not bear the consequences through lost income or damaged careers.

Once funding is secured, participation will carry performance expectations. Our user community’s compensation model is heavily incentivized. A participant who cannot perform the work may earn only the subsistence component of that compensation. That expectation must be understood before anyone commits.

People, Ideas & Objects’ schedule establishes a nine-year stewardship horizon, from September 2026 through September 2035. The four principal phases are sequential, with some minor overlap anticipated:

• September 2026–September 2028 — Resource Mobilization: Assemble the financial resources required to complete development.
• September 2028–September 2030 — Establish Our User Community: Recruit and establish the permanent community that will develop, support, and continuously improve Synallagi.
• September 2030–March 2034 — Product Development: Convert the specification into an operational product.
• March 2034–September 2035 — Commercial Release and Implementation: Release Synallagi, implement it, and stabilize the code base.
• After September 2035 — Continuous Development: Advance Synallagi through ongoing, iterative development by our user community.

The clearest opportunity to shorten this schedule lies in Resource Mobilization. That timing rests with producers’ officers and directors, who hold the authority, responsibility, accountability, and resources necessary to act.

This September 2026 announcement begins a two-year period during which we expect industry to assemble the resources required to develop Synallagi. The information needed to make an informed decision is available in our published materials. Producers who are dissatisfied with the offering are free to pursue other options. If those options include Enterprise Resource Planning solutions, they must proceed without using the Intellectual Property associated with this initiative.

If we fail to secure funding by the end of the Resource Mobilization phase, we will proceed on the basis that our hypothesis was incorrect. Producers would then have no reason to use the Intellectual Property developed to implement it. People, Ideas & Objects will cease pursuing operational software development and shift to an Intellectual Property litigation strategy.

Oil & gas producers taught me an important lesson about systems sales in the 1990s: do not do it. I intend to maintain my “no herding of cats” policy. A succession of conditional promises, contradictory commitments, and “let’s make a deal” negotiations will not deliver the resources or institutional commitment this undertaking requires.

I offer Synallagi as the solution to the industry’s accounting and administrative difficulties. If producers do not believe those difficulties apply to them, or do not accept the proposed solution, we have no business to conduct.

Producers may find a firm deadline difficult to accept. Yet the vision behind this initiative anticipated their present circumstances when the work began in 1991. There is also a practical limit to how long this commitment can remain open-ended: I will be 70 at the conclusion of the Resource Mobilization phase.

By then, I will have devoted 37 years to addressing what I regard as the greatest administrative difficulties the industry has faced—difficulties it has continued to ignore. Producers should consider what that commitment represents and what its limits mean for the opportunity before them. Perhaps it establishes a standard of persistence for others, within and beyond Enterprise Resource Planning.

These dates give prospective participants, contributors, investors, bankers, and resource providers a realistic basis for assessing the commitment involved. Synallagi requires substantial institutional, community, business, and technical development, supported by sustained participation over several years. Even with a nine-year horizon, our delivery expectations may prove highly optimistic.

Our September 2026 announcement opens the Resource Mobilization phase. Securing the funding will make it possible to assemble the technical, organizational, and human resources required to bring Synallagi into commercial operation.

Consider This... AI is the "Killer App" of IP

 Today we have another paper in the “Consider This…” series of relatively short discussions on topics of interest. This one raises several points that people in oil & gas may wish to debate. I’ve opened the blog to comments and welcome that discussion, although I encourage participants to protect their identities. We continue to attract the wrong kind of attention from producer officers and directors, and even participating in a debate could carry career consequences. Please exercise care.

I’ve been preaching the gospel of Intellectual Property as one of the primary competitive advantages of People, Ideas & Objects’ Synallagi, including its licensing through our user community and their service provider organizations. In this paper, I compare the challenge of explaining its value to the arrival of the personal computer in the 1980s.

People would ask, “What will you use it for?” Unless you were buying $1,000 databases and compilers, the answer was often “storing recipes.” We had acquired some remarkably expensive paperweights.

Then came applications such as Lotus 1-2-3, which gave businesses a compelling reason to put personal computers on their desks. The spreadsheet became a defining example of the “killer app”—an application whose usefulness made the underlying technology indispensable. Naturally, everyone also needed a computer at home to keep track of what those recipes were costing.

Many more “killer apps” followed. Our paper applies that familiar idea to Intellectual Property.

Artificial Intelligence Agents rummaging through corporate data, processes, and procedures may not seem like an immediate concern to everyone. As their reach and ability to act expand, however, the question becomes unavoidable: what defines the limits of their authority?

“Consider This…” proposes that Artificial Intelligence is the “killer app” of Intellectual Property. The business definitions, rules, and institutional arrangements embodied in that Intellectual Property provide the basis for constraining an Agent’s authority, scope, and scale of action. Those constraints must then be implemented and enforced in the software. This is particularly consequential in Enterprise Resource Planning, and central to the development we are undertaking.

We extend this argument to Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration in Synallagi. Orchestration is the part that deserves closer attention. A transaction requires more than the ability to interpret information. Who is involved? Who may access the data? What authority does each participant hold? Who can approve the transaction? What must happen before it proceeds?

These questions lead to many more as we account for the unique requirements of oil & gas and implement them in Synallagi. Intellectual Property defines. Artificial Intelligence interprets. Orchestration acts.

Orchestration is the traffic cop, the lights at intersections, the paved roads, and the speed limits that keep us somewhat civilized. It coordinates how a transaction proceeds through the participants, permissions, approvals, and other requirements that give it business meaning.

The paper is available here. Over the next few days, I’ll also publish its sections as individual blog posts, adding to the pile of recipes I’ve been accumulating here for some time.

A podcast will follow—if I can teach Artificial Intelligence to pronounce Synallagi. At this stage, it is almost comical: a different pronunciation every time, and never the right one. I’ve tried explaining that it rhymes with “technology” or “philosophy.” Apparently, we may need to begin with what “rhymes” means.