Industrial companies have spent years investing in digital tools, models, and systems. The returns have often been mixed because the digital layer still moves more slowly than the physical world it’s meant to support.
In oil and gas, like in many other industries, that gap has direct consequences. When documentation falls behind, data sits in disconnected systems, and current site information is hard to access, planning slows down, validation takes longer, and teams spend more time confirming what’s actually true in the field.
NavVis is partnered with ExxonMobil to address that problem. Together, the two companies are working on what Michael Hotaling describes as one of the largest digital twin foundations in the world.
In an OGGN podcast appearance, Michael Hotaling, Executive Advisor at ExxonMobil focused on Technology Scouting, Innovation, and Ventures, and Finn Boysen, Chief Revenue Officer at NavVis, explain the thinking behind that work. Hotaling describes the central challenge as Mean Time to Reality: the distance between what’s true in the physical environment and what people can actually use in digital form.
Shortening that distance is key to ensuring digital systems become useful in practice.
That framing also helps explain why so many digital initiatives in industry stall before they become foundational. Information stays siloed. Tools are introduced for narrow purposes. Outputs solve one immediate problem and stay inside one workflow.
As Hotaling says, “all of this information used to be siloed,” and too often “there was a solution to solve a specific problem,” but “when that problem was done, it basically got lost.”
NavVis brings a practical combination of speed, usable accuracy, and broader access to site reality. As Boysen explains, NavVis can capture at “roughly 10 times the normal speed,” bring the data “down to the accuracy” needed for oil and gas work, and provide “reality access” to many more users than traditional workflows allowed.
That changes the economics of what can be maintained at scale.
Large industrial environments no longer have to be documented once and then left to age. Current conditions can be captured more frequently, used more broadly, and kept closer to the state of the site as it actually exists. Hotaling makes the owner-operator side of that shift clear when he notes that older methods made large-scale digitization too slow and too expensive to sustain, while newer capabilities make it far more practical.
Mobile capture also produces a different kind of dataset. Moving through a site and capturing it from more angles can create a more complete view of the environment than a sequence of fixed static setups. That gives teams a richer basis for downstream work, especially where detail and context matter.
This work, and the impact of the technology, doesn’t stop at scanning.
A current and accessible view of the site supports planning, validation, maintenance, turnaround preparation, and coordination across disciplines. It supports comparison between field conditions and drawings or P&IDs. It gives teams a stronger basis for decisions that have usually depended on a mix of outdated records, specialist handoffs, and repeat site visits.
It’s why Hotaling argues that “as built,” as a concept, should “go away.” He’s pointing to the limits of static documentation in environments that keep changing.
The same applies to the broader move toward a more visual way of working. As Hotaling puts it, this is already how people work in everyday life: they look for video, visual context, and faster ways to understand what they need to do. That expectation is carrying over into industrial environments as well.
Workers need clearer context, quicker understanding, and easier access to information in the flow of work. Better access to current conditions helps teams prepare more effectively, coordinate more smoothly, and spend less time resolving uncertainty. It can also reduce unnecessary time in hazardous environments and lower the effort required to piece together incomplete or disconnected information.
Openness runs through the partnership in the same way. ExxonMobil isn’t building toward another closed stack.
Hotaling describes ExxonMobil’s digital landscape as an ecosystem built on agnostic capture, agnostic spatial data storage, interoperability across platforms, and consumption tools chosen by task and user. Boysen refers to it as a reality-first view: the reality belongs to ExxonMobil, and the systems around it need to stay open enough to support broad use over time.
Data accuracy, or data “freshness,” is part of the model as well.
People trust data when they know it’s current and what state it represents. Hotaling speaks about “ever known” information, and Boysen makes the practical version just as clearly: recent data gets used; old data gets questioned.
That has an operational consequence. Teams stop rebuilding context from scratch for every project, shutdown, or site decision. They spend less time verifying whether the documentation still holds up and more time using a shared view of the site to move work forward. That’s exactly when a stronger digital foundation starts to compound.
At ExxonMobil’s scale, that’s a real test. This is technology that has to support critical work, fit into a broader environment, remain open enough for long-term use, and create value now while leaving room for more use cases over time. As Hotaling says, the work is already being executed, and as Boysen adds, it’s moving forward because it’s creating value today, not because it rests on a vague promise years from now.
Watch the full recording of the OGGN podcast to learn more about how NavVis and ExxonMobil are building one of the world’s largest digital twin foundations.