Offshore schedules, safety records and contract margins are tracked in separate systems and reviewed after the fact. Project leaders see weather windows, certification gaps and contract margin together, with every safety decision left to HSE leadership.
A worked example for a typical Malaysian Upstream Services & Marine Contractor, not a description of any real company. Go through the six stages in order: paste each prompt into Claude, check the answer against how your business really works, then continue. Change the profile at the start to match yours.
Stage 1 of 6
Map how the operation really runs
Act as an operations consultant. I run a Upstream Services & Marine Contractor in Malaysia. Profile: A Malaysian oil and gas services contractor — offshore maintenance and marine support, ~2,000 staff and contractors, several PETRONAS-linked contracts.
Interview me, one question at a time, to map how decisions actually get made today. Cover: the recurring meetings and reports, who decides what, which numbers people trust, and where decisions are late or made on gut feel.
Known friction: Utilisation vs Safety margin; Bid price vs Margin; Schedule vs Weather risk; Local content vs Capability; Cost vs Integrity.
After 8 to 10 questions, summarise the five decisions that cost us the most when made late, in a table: decision, current owner, current delay, cost of delay.
Stage 2 of 6
Design the specialist agents
Using the decision map above, design 5 specialist AI agents for our Upstream Services & Marine Contractor: Contracts, Operations, HSE, Asset, Portfolio.
For each agent give: the one question it answers every day, the data it reads, what it may recommend, what it must never do alone, and the format of its output.
Starting points for what each should watch:
- Contracts: tender pipeline, rate competitiveness, local-content rules
- Operations: campaign schedules, vessel availability, weather windows
- HSE: incident and near-miss trends, certification expiry, fatigue risk
- Asset: inspection due dates, corrosion trends, spares
- Portfolio: margin by contract, utilisation, renewal risk
Keep every agent narrow. If an agent covers two jobs, split it.
Stage 3 of 6
Wire up data and compliance
For the agents above, list the data feeds needed. Likely systems: Project and scheduling systems; HSE incident database; Asset integrity records; Vessel and crew management systems.
Output a table per agent: field, source, how often it refreshes, data-quality risk, and what the agent should do if the feed is stale or missing. Mark every personal-data field and say how to minimise it.
Rules we operate under: PETRONAS standards and contract terms, DOSH and offshore safety rules, local-content requirements, and strict data-confidentiality obligations. Safety decisions stay with HSE leadership.
End with a short list of actions that always need human sign-off.
Stage 4 of 6
Design the morning brief
Design the single daily brief that pulls the 5 agents together for the CEO, ready before the first meeting of the day.
Specify how the brief merges overlapping or conflicting recommendations, how it ranks items (impact, urgency, reversibility, confidence), and the exact fields per item: what to decide, recommended action, evidence, owner, deadline, and the cost of doing nothing.
Then write a realistic sample brief of five items. Items might resemble: Move the platform turnaround two days earlier to catch the weather window / Replace four expiring offshore survival certificates before the next crew change / Pass on the tender: margin is under 4% after local-content costs.
Stage 5 of 6
Build and automate it
Turn the design into a working automation for our Upstream Services & Marine Contractor.
Needs: a scheduled daily run; the 5 agents run in parallel and each saves structured JSON; a final step reads them all and sends the brief by email or chat; every run is logged with inputs, outputs and cost.
Propose the build with Claude plus a workflow tool (for example n8n or the Claude Agent SDK). Give the steps in order, what happens when a data feed fails, and a human-approval step before anything that spends money or makes a customer commitment.
Stage 6 of 6
Roll out and measure
Write a rollout plan for the Upstream Services & Marine Contractor agent team that starts small and earns trust.
Stage 1: one agent, advisory only, run alongside the current process. Stage 2: add the other agents. Stage 3: switch on the daily brief. Stage 4: let agents prepare low-risk actions for approval.
For each stage give duration, owners, what "ready to move on" means, and the metrics to track: time to decision, how often recommendations are accepted, hours saved, and errors caught. Close with the three biggest risks and how we contain them.
