Yo! I even worked on a software project for automation once upon a time. Main thing IMHO is that the industry uses a lot of hardware that has payback periods o

Yo! I even worked on a software project for automation once upon a time. Main thing IMHO is that the industry uses a lot of hardware that has payback periods of decades. Nobody's going to spend money on high-end new automated gear unless they have high confidence that there's going to be enough business in the next few years/decades to pay it off. The offshore operators tend to buy in first, both because they have the capital, and because the cost and risk of keeping more people offshore is so much higher. Land operators tend to get this kind of stuff at a trickle. The headcounts will fall, but not as much or as fast as some would have us think, both for that reason, and because this stuff is hard to get right. The project that I worked on mostly put more people on the rig just to keep all of the stuff running. There were only a handful of rigs in the field with enough automatic hardware to use our system in the first place.