Abu Dhabi's AIQ Teams Up With Quartermaster on AI Monitoring for Offshore Energy Sites

The agreement was signed during ADIPEC 2026 in Abu Dhabi. It will focus first on the UAE, and the companies plan to look at the wider Gulf Cooperation Council region and international markets later. Neither company has disclosed financial terms.

The deal links two kinds of monitoring. Quartermaster's SmartMast network turns working vessels into sensors that detect and identify other ships without relying on AIS transponder data, GNSS positioning or satellites. The company says it has logged more than three million detections across 25 countries. AIQ brings its offshore oil and gas experience and SMARTi, a computer vision system it has already deployed on dozens of vessels operating in the UAE.

The partners said they would evaluate joint commercial opportunities and demonstrate combined systems for watching over offshore platforms, pipelines and subsea infrastructure. The uses they described include detecting unauthorised vessels and suspicious activity at sea, identifying safety incidents, and providing data-backed risk assessments that could help operators get better insurance terms.

This is the second agreement Quartermaster has signed with a G42 company at this year's ADIPEC. Presight, the G42 applied AI company that holds a majority stake in AIQ, signed a memorandum of understanding with Quartermaster at the show. That deal will explore combining Quartermaster's sensing network with Presight's analytics for vessel tracking, anomaly detection and the protection of critical maritime infrastructure, starting in the UAE. Quartermaster chief executive Neil Sobin described his company's approach as "turning working vessels into a distributed sensing network" when the Presight deal was announced.

AIQ was set up in 2020 and sells AI tools to the energy sector, most of them built around ADNOC's upstream and offshore operations. The Quartermaster agreement is exploratory. The companies have not announced a customer, a pilot site or a date for a first demonstration.