Taming the Owner Communications Chaos
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Release Date: 11/19/2025
Money Under the Mattress
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Oil and gas operators have always known that surplus equipment is part of doing business. Projects get cancelled. Long-lead items are over-ordered. Assets are parked in yards, warehouses, and sea cans “just in case.” Over time, those decisions quietly turn into idle capital sitting on balance sheets, often forgotten until space runs out or write-downs loom. What’s changed is the cost of ignoring it. Tight capital markets, tariffs, long lead times, and supply chain friction make surplus harder to justify. At the same time, operators face pressure to improve capital efficiency, demonstrate...
info_outline
AI Agents Are Starting To Reshape Upstream Operations
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Upstream oil and gas companies continue to be very reliant on spreadsheets, legacy systems, and manual workflows to manage thousands of wells, compliance filings, and capital decisions. It’s labor-intensive, error-prone, and slow. In light of global energy transition moves, operators are now facing ongoing margin pressure, a supply glut, tighter emissions regulations, and a shrinking pool of skilled labor. Digital solutions to soften the impacts of these pressures too often end up in “pilot hell”, with limited results, stalled momentum, and no path to scale. Core systems like SCADA and...
info_outline
Why Bad Data Undermines AI, And How Good Governance Fixes It
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
The energy industry is rapidly adopting artificial intelligence. Its promises of improved productivity, safety, and operational insight are too good to ignore. But these tools are only as good as the data that feeds them. And therein lies the problem: data across the sector is often incomplete, inconsistent, and scattered. This historic lack of discipline around data now has consequences. Poor data quality when used in AI undermines any project leveraging AI, exposing companies to greater audit risk, slowing down decision-making, and derailing expensive digital programs. Worse, AI tools...
info_outline
Why Digital Sovereignty Matters
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Have you ever given thought to the possibility that the suppliers of your core business technology, brands like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, might simply turn you off with no warning? It sounds fanciful, absurd, a black swan event so far beyond any reasonable risk matrix as to be unworthy of consideration. Yet it happened this year, 2025, to a major oil company in the world’s most populous country. What was once unimaginable is now here, and with it, lessons for every oil and gas organization, indeed every company, about the new risks in the digital landscape. ⚒️ Additional Tools &...
info_outline
From Brownfield to Greenfield to Bluefield
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Most large enterprises rely on a handful of expansive technology platform solutions to run their business, and the most prominent and widely deployed in oil and gas is SAP. As I’ve outlined in my books, enterprise solutions such as SAP are also migrating to digital technologies, which triggers a major question: what is the optimal upgrade path for an SAP customer, or any enterprise technology, to adopt? Broadly speaking, there are two strategies to this vexxing question: a brownfield migration or “lift and shift” and a greenfield re-implementation or “start afresh”. The problem is...
info_outline
Can You Test A Plant Before It's Built?
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Motors are the quiet workhorses of industry. They drive pumps, fans, compressors, and heaters, and they consume more than sixty percent of the power in most industrial operations. When operators need to control motor speed, they historically relied on mechanical adjustments or trial-and-error testing to keep processes stable and safe. As motors get larger and drive trains more complex, traditional testing approaches no longer work. Bringing every component together for a full string test adds months of delay and millions of dollars in logistics. The industry is conservative and reference...
info_outline
Breaking the Paper Habit
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Canada’s energy sector has long struggled with low productivity on the front line, as indeed the entire Canadian economy. Despite heroic efforts by tradespeople, their effectiveness is hamstrung by badly dated processes, old disconnected systems, and paper-based workflows. The problem isn’t the workers. It’s that they’re too often sent out with the wrong drawings, the wrong tools, the wrong permits, or even to the wrong location. Multiply that by a hundreds of thousands of jobs, and you’ve got a national productivity drag. One company, , set out to build a completely paperless,...
info_outline
Taming the Owner Communications Chaos
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Oil and gas companies are finally confronting the huge communications and stakeholder challenge they face with their asset owners and stakeholders. Production assets such as oil and gas wells almost always have many part owners (land owners, JV partners, interest-holders, trusts, first nations tribes). Managing these hundreds or thousands of parties across tens of thousands of wells is really demanding. These relationships are complex, sensitive and often layered with legacy ownership structures, royalty flows, regulatory demands and reputational risk. This is much more than an operational...
info_outline
Unlocking Capital for Latin America’s Energy Transformation
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Latin America is entering a period of rapid economic growth, urbanization, and industrial expansion. Unlike North America and Europe, where primary energy demand has been flat for more than a decade, the region’s energy consumption is rising sharply. A young, increasingly urban population is pushing electricity and fuel demand higher, placing new pressure on infrastructure and supply. This demand surge is colliding with a second global shift: the explosive rise of AI and hyperscaler data centers. These digital megaprojects require enormous volumes of power, often sourced from natural gas,...
info_outline
Power Without Surprises
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Electricity powers nearly everything in oil and gas, from pumps and motors, to compressors and digital systems. But while production engineers obsess over volumes and temperatures, the quality of the electricity driving their systems is often overlooked. Most teams only discover power issues after equipment fails, leading to unplanned downtime and costly repairs. Unfortunately, traditional power quality meters and relay monitors don’t catch the early warning signs. They lack resolution, require manual data pulls, and don’t provide actionable insights. Worse still, the frontline...
info_outlineOil and gas companies are finally confronting the huge communications and stakeholder challenge they face with their asset owners and stakeholders.
Production assets such as oil and gas wells almost always have many part owners (land owners, JV partners, interest-holders, trusts, first nations tribes). Managing these hundreds or thousands of parties across tens of thousands of wells is really demanding. These relationships are complex, sensitive and often layered with legacy ownership structures, royalty flows, regulatory demands and reputational risk.
This is much more than an operational hassle. It’s a brand and trust issue. When owners ask: “Where’s my check?” or “What’s this charge on my statement?”, slow responses can damage goodwill, complicate legal compliance and create unnecessary risk. Companies try to manage but have often saddled themselves with dueling systems in the land department, operations, legal, and corporate communications.
I was delighted to learn about Firm App, a clever digital solution to this chaos, that was co-founded by two brothers, Deren Boyd and Dagen Boyd, and partner Josh Wright. Firm App was initially aimed at the legal profession, who also have many parties to manage, but the stakeholder problem in oil and gas turned out to be far more pressing.
Their purpose‑built platform delivers better and more responsive owner communications, stakeholder transparency and operational risk reduction. It uses AI to answer many routine enquiries freeing up scarce staff to focus on more important tickets. Owners see their relationship through a portal, and companies even save on paper and postage.
👤 About the Guests
Deren Boyd is co‑founder of Firm App, an AI-based owner relations software headquartered in Norman, OK. Before Firm App, Deren served as Senior Vice President of New Markets at KPA, leading growth strategy and expansion into new industries following KPA’s acquisition of iScout, an EHS management software he co-founded in 2020.
Earlier in his career, Deren was Vice President of Safety and Compliance for Crescent Companies, an oilfield services firm based in Oklahoma City.
A proud graduate of the University of Oklahoma, Deren holds a Bachelor’s in Health & Sports Science and a Master’s in Adult and Higher Education. Before entering the safety and software industries, he spent seven years in intercollegiate athletics at OU as Assistant Athletics Director of Development and Director of Basketball Operations.
Deren lives in Norman OK with his wife, Monica, and their four children.
Dagen Boyd is a co‑founder of Firm App, an AI-based owner relations software headquartered in Norman, OK. Prior to Firm App, he served as Director of Corporate Development for Crescent Services, LLC, an oilfield services company based in Oklahoma City. Applying his knowledge of oilfield operations, Dagen co-founded iScout, an EHS management software that offers safety reporting, training, asset management, and more. iScout was acquired by KPA Services in 2020. Dagen is a proud graduate of the University of Oklahoma and lives in Edmond, OK with his wife and their three children..
🛠️ Additional Tools & Resources
🔗 Connect with Me
🎤 Contact for Lectures and Keynotes
I speak regularly on these and other topics—if you’re looking for a speaker at your next event, contact me here to book a call for your needs.
⚠️ Disclaimer
The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.