I built hybrid agentic AI in 2006. BDI multi-agent systems grounded in formal ontologies, running real-time agentic decision support on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. The technology worked. Then the 2008 financial crisis ended it. Twenty years later, the governance architecture I proved at industrial scale is exactly what boards now need.

This was not a departure. My discipline is the origin point. Geophysics, and the spatial-statistics branch of mathematical geology known as geostatistics, were the private sector's first encounter with industrial-scale digital data: terabyte seismic volumes, ensemble-based uncertainty, inversion of underdetermined systems, multi-scale signal analysis. My part-time geophysics and geostatistics professor at KU Leuven from 1989 to 1992 was Philippe Doyen, then R&D manager for reservoir geophysics at Western Geophysical and the first to publish on the application of geostatistics to seismic-driven reservoir characterisation. As an MSc student in 1991, on a travel grant from Petrofina (now part of TotalEnergies), I visited Western Geophysical's computing centre in Houston, then the largest combined processing power at any non-classified site in the world. The vocabulary the data-science field has been adopting over the last twenty years was already in production in the geosciences when I was learning it.

The intervening decades were not idle. As a contributor to the OLF/Epsis IO Value Assessment, I helped produce the analysis behind NOK 300 billion (about USD 50 billion) in digital transformation value for the Norwegian Oil Industry Association, including the 82/18 Rule that reshaped how the industry measures transformation returns. From 2006 to 2008 I managed a joint industry project on operations centres with Chevron, Shell and Norsk Hydro (now part of Equinor), then continued as organiser of biannual strategic workshops with the heads of corporate digital transformation at Chevron and Equinor, on a five-to-ten year horizon.

From 2009 to 2012 I was programme manager of a 22-organisation joint industry project for Statoil and ENI, leading the semantic interoperability work for what the industry then envisioned as autonomous drilling and production on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.

As Executive Advisor on the Tyra Redevelopment, advising the Mærsk Oil EVP through Epsis on behalf of the operator, I built the digital strategy and value case for the $3.35 billion project that became Denmark's largest gas field redevelopment.

As Head of Data Office at TotalEnergies EP Danmark, I built enterprise data governance from nothing and achieved world-leading Digital Twin adoption across that same field.

As CEO of the Knowledge Graph Alliance from 2024 to 2025, I advanced open semantic standards across a cross-industry membership that included Airbus, Michelin, Bosch and TotalEnergies.

I am now open to Chief Data Officer, non-executive and board advisory mandates, where the same governance questions decide whether agentic AI creates value or liability.

PhD in Applied Physics, cum laude, Delft University of Technology. Deputy Board Member, Bergen University College, 2011 to 2015, appointed by the Norwegian Ministry of Education. Executive advisory at billion-dollar scale. Enterprise data governance. And the hybrid AI that started it all.

The gap between board oversight and agent autonomy is where liability lives. I close it with machine-readable contracts, not dashboards.