In capital-intensive industries like oil and gas, pharma, and others, multi-million and even billion-dollar high-stakes decisions are made on a regular basis. In making these business-critical, high-stakes decisions, success depends on an effective decision-making process and high-quality choices.

Now, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies are being integrated with good decision processes to improve how organizations sift through alternatives early in the process of large capital investment decisions. A great decision in the “concept select” stage of, for example, a resource-intensive industry can contribute to vastly better value generation than the next-best alternative.

This article by Sang-Won Kim, head of SDG’s global energy practice, is based on a longer technical paper first published as “Finding the Right Concept Via a Decision Quality Framework with Rapid Generation of Multiple Deepwater Conceptual Alternatives,” by Yifei Zeng et al., presented at the 2022 Society of Petroleum Engineers Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition. The technical paper is available for purchase at OnePetro, the online library of technical literature for the oil and gas industry.