Odfjell Technology embraces AI: Automated Lead Generation

About the client

Odfjell Technology is an international drilling and well services company headquartered in Norway. The company operates across both onshore and offshore energy, delivering drilling, projects, engineering, and well services to the oil, gas and energy sectors. With over five decades as a leading player in the oilfield services industry, Odfjell Technology combines experience, expertise, and advanced technology to support operators in some of the most demanding environments worldwide.

Our collaboration with Odfjell Technology began in the summer of 2023 with the migration of their sales and marketing solution from HubSpot to the Microsoft platform. We started with the Well Services business area, where sales processes were already well established. Since then, the client has successfully extended the solution into several additional parts of the organisation over the past 18 months, with ProsessPilotene providing ongoing support.

The challenge: Lead sourcing was too time-consuming

Until recently, Odfjell Technology’s sales teams spent a considerable amount of time manually searching for potential projects and customers by scanning industry news and updates across various sites. The work was time-consuming, difficult to scale, and far from efficient.

At the same time, the company wanted to get more value out of their existing technology investments – in particular the sales module within Dynamics 365 Sales.

Oddie – an AI-agent scraping the web

In one of our advisory meetings with Odfjell Technology, the idea emerged: what if an AI agent could automate this task?

Within six weeks we developed a customised solution capable of finding and pre-qualifying leads. The result was Oddie. This AI agent now monitors close to 900 news sources and pinpoints relevant articles that may indicate projects where Odfjell Technology’s services are in demand.

When Oddie identifies such an article, the content is analysed. If it matches the set criteria, a lead is automatically created in Dynamics 365, ready for a salesperson to qualify and follow up.

Results and lessons so far

In the first four to five weeks of testing, Oddie identified several thousand potential leads. The scale of this outcome demonstrates the enormous potential of the solution – in fact, it created a positive challenge for the sales organisation: how can we qualify and follow up on such a volume of opportunities?

The focus now is on refining the qualification process, training the AI models to discard irrelevant findings more quickly, and ensuring the sales team can dedicate their energy to the most promising opportunities. This work is already well underway within Odfjell Technology.

Pathway for smarter scaling

At present, news sources are defined manually. Looking ahead, Oddie could also be trained to identify and incorporate new, relevant sources automatically.

By addressing one task that previously consumed excessive time, we’ve established a concrete solution that paves the way for smarter, data-driven business development in the future.

Technology with purpose

By connecting insights, technology, and business needs, we’ve worked with Odfjell Technology to deliver a solution that is both effective and forward-looking. Oddie is a strong example of how intelligent use of existing technology – coupled with sound business understanding – can generate real value. Most importantly, it reduces the use of time and resources, freeing sales teams to focus on selling rather than investigative or prospecting work.

Technology used:
Azure Storage, Azure Functions, and Azure OpenAI, together with tools such as BeautifulSoup and Newspaper3k, fully integrated with Dynamics 365 and Dataverse.