AI in general at the time was led by a VP and a particular group (that was AI tech specialized) under him. The initial idea came about from them. We were trying to find new ways of using AI to research new sources of crude at the time.
Another AI project I worked on there was a chemical tank use estimation and refuel application which used tank sensors, previous use history and some other metrics to pre-purchase and deliver product to keep tank reserves above a certain threshold.
I was a developer at Shell a couple years back and led a project where we were using nascent GPT-1/2 to process and search over mountains of documents. It was a fun project where I wrote a complex/fancy UI for a stratigraphic filter and indexing system...