This is my third year going to Quorum’s Qnections conference in Vegas.
This time, I was joined by Michael Hirsch and Jeremiah Henson. I love nerdy O&G data talk, but man does Vegas wear me out. I guess that says something about how useful the conference is to me – this year was once again worthwhile (although I did skip out on the dance party at the end!). Notes below, pay attention to the 800-lb gorilla!
If you haven’t been keeping up…
I’ve mentioned this in a couple of previous blog posts, but the Quorum today is dramatically different from what it was 10-15 years ago. It’s a 1700 employee behemoth with >$150mm/yr EBITDA. It has a solution basically every part of the E&P digital ecosystem, except for public data subscriptions (*cough* duopoly *cough*). They’ve made a string of acquisitions over the last decade, expanding what was once a company with 4-5 applications for sale into one with roughly 40, from accounting and land to measurement, SCADA, planning, reserves, etc., etc. They boast 1500 customers across upstream and midstream operating companies, with a global footprint. Francisco Partners liked them enough to pay $2.4B for them in early 2025.
If you’re still thinking of them as the consulting firm spinoff from 30+ years ago with TIPS, QPTM, QLS, and Enterprise Accounting, that’s out-of-date. Read my 2025 Qnections post for a little more detail on all that. This is Quorum’s flagship marketing and customer success event each year: 800+ attendees, 100+ Quorum employees, and dozens of breakout presentations.
So what’s this current version of Quorum up to in 2026? Three big themes I heard:
- AI in their tools
- AI behind their tools
- Continued rationalization of the tech stack
AI in their tools
I quit counting mentions of “AI” about halfway through Quorum’s first keynote presentation. Nearly every breakout presentation mentioned features that they are working on: adding Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots to the front end, extracting data from documents and images, building API’s to enable interaction with other tools like Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and ontological/semantic models to help language models better understand the data coming out of their systems.
Probably the most mature/ambitious thing they have built so far are the “agentic planning” workflows on top of their reserves/planning stack – tools like Val Nav, Enersight, and PlanningSpace. They showed a demo of being able to use natural language instructions to drive scenario planning – driving new scenario creation, QC, and iterations from a chat window. There is a lot of work left before it’ll be truly production-ready, but the bones of a real solution are there.
Another interesting use case was exploring a basket of potential scenarios – for instance a 5x5x5 matrix of different development options is 125 scenarios. In pretty much any traditional GUI, that would be thousands of clicks and hundreds of hours – a recipe for both carpal tunnel and some typos. With a well-designed chatbot, could that be a few hundred words of prompting plus a few hours of QC work?
I don’t think Planning is Quorum’s highest value opportunity for AI agents by any means, but it benefits from being an area that is 1) high-visibility to E&P executives (i.e. good for buzz) and 2) *not* subject to the audit/regulatory scrutiny where LLM hallucinations are so scary. If it goes well, I’m guessing they’ll start pushing into more sensitive (and IMO higher-value) opportunities in accounting and regulatory workflows.
AI behind their tools
I spend a *lot* of time talking to E&P software vendors, and this is a near-universal theme I’m hearing. Tools like Claude Code are being used by everyone and driving optimism about faster product backlog burndowns and more aggressive roadmaps. Quorum employees were chest-thumping in presentations (and trash-talking each other at happy hours) about who burned the most tokens last month.
Two areas that I think are going to be big here – rapid prototyping and refactoring legacy code. One product manager described taking a feature request into Claude Code and having it generate a set of different prototypes. After some refinement, she could take the top two or three candidates to a user feedback group in just a few days, then looping that back into the product as a final, user-validated feature set in a fraction of what it would normally take.
That said, I think the bigger opportunity for Quorum (and many other software companies with legacy tech stacks) is using LLM’s to help modernize their code. Because of how today’s Quorum was assembled as a MergeCo, thy have at least two dozen distinct tech stacks under the hoods of their tools. Different back-end databases, programming languages, and hosting environments make it time-consuming and expensive for them to roll out new features or integrations. The other MergeCo E&P software companies have similar issues (and opportunities) – P2/IFS, Pak, Enverus, S&P, Landmark, etc.
LLM-assisted code migrations have the potential to dramatically speed up modernizations. Think about handing a cutting-edge algorithm a 30-year-old source code in on-prem Oracle and C++, and tell it to rebuild on serverless, multi-tenant PostgreSQL + Angular/.NET. Combine that with some testing protocols based on watching a real user drive the old version, and you might be able to get to a clean, relatively bug-free version in weeks instead of years.
I see this as a HUGE opportunity for Quorum, simply because they have a lot of old (yet trusted) applications. QLS, QPTM, TIPS, FlowCAL, Enterprise Accounting, Val Nav, Enersight – the list goes on and on and on. These are apps that have hundreds or even thousands of users, but have struggled to innovate because they are on legacy stacks. The Enterprise Accounting (aka QCFS/QRA/QDO/etc) team gave a presentation on their long-awaited migration to a cloud-native, multi-tenant solution. The timelines they are talking about initially made me chuckle at their aggressiveness. But as I though more about it, I think they might be sandbagging. This stuff could happen FAST if Quorum wants it to.
Continued rationalization of the stack
This shouldn’t really be news to any Quorum customers but it bears repeating – there are clear winners and losers among Quorum’s 40-ish applications. This year’s agenda wasn’t made public, but trust me when I say – clear winners include FLOWCAL, all things On Demand, My Quorum Accounting, My Quorum Land, and more. Some names we didn’t hear discussed include EnergyIQ, OGsql, DaWinci, and more.
Along with that, we’re seeing more mature integrations between the “winner” applications. Pretty much all of the logical integrations between the On Demand applications are now in place (payment status, production volumes, well header data, etc.). They also talked about some integrations between On Demand applications and the “enterprise” or “My Quorum” apps like My Quorum Accounting and Quorum Land System (QLS) – specifically between ODL and My Quorum Accounting. Reading between the lines, ODL seems to be getting a lot more love and attention than QLS. Is the writing on the wall for the future of Land Applications at Quorum?
Wrap up
Notwithstanding trash talk from a certain well-known O&G memelord, Quorum has enormous market share and diversification. They also have a lot of smart people. They sometimes do things that I can’t make sense of (or even consider outright baffling). But I’m unwilling to bet that they (or for that matter ANY large, well-funded, well-staffed software company) is going to roll over and get crushed by the LLM/AI wave. I flew to Vegas with that as my base case assumption, and I returned continuing to believe that. I have seen software companies fumble the ball with incumbent advantages many times, and Quorum may well turn out to be a victim of the much-discussed SaaSpocalype, but what I heard last week makes me believe that’s unlikely.
Ask me again next year – as fast as things are moving these days, I may just have a new opinion!