I co-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. Leadership abandoned 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 in digital transformation value for the Norwegian Oil Industry Association, including the 82/18 Rule that reshaped how the industry measures transformation returns. 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 programmes at Chevron and Equinor, working on a five-to-ten year horizon.

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

As Head of Data Office at TotalEnergies EP Danmark, I achieved world-leading Digital Twin adoption and governed enterprise data across Denmark's largest gas field.

As CEO of the Knowledge Graph Alliance from 2024 to 2025, I advanced semantic standards with Airbus, Michelin, Bosch, and TotalEnergies. I led a 22-organisation industrial programme on semantic interoperability, complementary to Equinor's strategic MapIT/GODI initiative: building the semantic infrastructure for what was ultimately envisioned as autonomous drilling and production operations.

Currently IT Product Owner at VIKING Life-Saving Equipment, where the same governance questions apply to agentic AI in global service operations.

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

This series exists because the gap between board oversight and agent autonomy is where liability lives. I close it with machine-readable contracts, not dashboards.