From Legacy Chaos to Controlled Decom with AI Intelligence & Regulatory Assurance

Context / Problem

BP’s upstream and downstream businesses had accumulated thousands of digital and physical assets across global operations:

• retired wells, aging infrastructure, process manuals, vendor systems

• legacy SharePoint sites, file shares, app servers, HSE documentation

• scattered registers of equipment, drawings, contracts, safety cases

• inconsistent metadata and unknown ownership

This fragmentation created major challenges:

• Regulatory exposure under OGUK, HSE, NSTA, ISO 14224

• High decom costs due to poor asset lineage and missing data

• Shadow IT risks from unknown systems

• Inability to prove compliance or track end-of-life decisions

• People and knowledge loss as experts retired

Approach

iaai.work deployed an AI-driven Decom Discovery Engine that mapped:

• all digital assets (documents, sites, databases, servers, models)

• all physical assets (platforms, subsea, pipelines, wells, equipment)

• all “people assets” (roles, teams, ownership links, SMEs)

• all regulatory tags (HSE, NSTA, OGUK, environmental duty-of-care)

• governance controls (retention, classification, risk scores)

Solution

We created a single Decom Intelligence Register that unified:

• asset IDs

• ownership

• lifecycle stage

• compliance status

• risk and cost metrics

• remediation requirements

• scheduled end-of-life actions

• AI classification of missing metadata

• automatic regulatory evidence packs

BP teams could now see every asset they needed to decommission in one place.

Value / ROI

BP achieved measurable impact within 6 months:

BenefitResultReduced Decom Cost Overruns↓ 27% cost reduction via accurate scopingRegulatory Assurance100% HSE/NSTA audit readinessOperational EfficiencyTeams worked 3× faster with AI-generated metadataShadow Asset Reduction42% unknown assets identified & assessedKnowledge ContinuitySME dependency reduced through automated lineage

Why This Applies to Any Asset Class

The BP model generalized perfectly across:

• People: owners, SMEs, RACI clarity

• Products: lifecycle, certification, change controls

• Matters (legal): versions, obligations, audit trails

• Data domains: golden records, lineage, architecture

• Web Assets: classification, risk, accessibility, privacy

Decom becomes a universal pattern of lifecycle governance.
BP proved that any asset—digital or physical—can be governed with the same intelligence framework.