Shankar Narayanan's professional arc is a powerful illustration of how domain expertise, digital transformation, and systems thinking can come together to reshape global energy infrastructure.
From his early days as a controls engineer in oil and gas fields to his current role leading energy partnerships at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Narayanan has helped define the future of operational reliability and energy resiliency.
Narayanan's strategic leadership has empowered leading energy companies to strike the optimal balance between performance, cost efficiency, and operational risk. Today, he is widely recognised as a subject matter expert and leading authority in industrial optimisation and AI-driven energy solutions.
Foundations in Field Controls Engineering
Narayanan began his career deep in the field, designing control logic for high-horsepower rotating equipment critical to the oil and gas supply chain. Early in his tenure at GE, he developed and deployed OptiComp-BN, an innovative software platform that used real-time sensor fusion to prevent compressor surges, an event that could trigger plant-wide shutdowns, pose safety risks, and cost operators over $2.5 million per incident.
The solution enabled operators to detect and mitigate surge conditions before they occurred, eliminating the need for high-risk testing and reducing unplanned downtime by more than 30%. OptiComp-BN has become a foundational control platform, adopted across operations in Alaska, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, and remains embedded in many of today's extraction fields, compressor stations, and refineries.
'Field controls engineering taught me the importance of stability, repeatability, and responsiveness. That experience became the foundation for how I think about reliability at scale,' Narayanan reflects.
Scaling Impact Through Global Leadership
After delivering several field-level innovations, Narayanan transitioned into broader technical and commercial leadership roles. From 2014 to 2021, he led major initiatives across product strategy, engineering delivery, and go-to-market operations for GE & Baker Hughes's global energy business.
He built engineering hubs in Hyderabad and Dubai, trained and scaled international teams, and spearheaded a new approach to customer engagement rooted in control system modernisation and reliability engineering. This technology-centric model enabled GE to better serve North American oil and gas customers with tailored solutions that addressed system uptime, asset longevity, and risk mitigation.
His hybrid skill set, combining technical credibility with business acumen, became a defining advantage. It positioned him to bridge sales, engineering, and field services, earning him multiple leadership recognitions and a place in GE and Baker Hughes' elite Executive Leadership Program.
Driving Methane Reduction at Baker Hughes
Narayanan's role in Baker Hughes marked a new chapter, one that brought together his technical depth and business vision to address one of the industry's most pressing challenges: methane emissions.
As Director of Sales and Commercial Operations, he led the launch of a novel methane leak detection and abatement platform. The product used advanced algorithms and sensor orchestration to identify high-risk leaks and prioritise field response, enabling faster remediation and reduced loss.
More than a compliance tool, it became a core offering in Baker Hughes' digital solutions portfolio, helping U.S. operators significantly reduce methane emissions, improve system integrity, and minimise waste. For many North American producers, the solution enabled the recovery of millions of dollars in lost gas revenue. It improved the economics of field operations by reducing both risk and operational costs.
Leading the Cloud Revolution in Energy
Today, Narayanan serves as a senior leader at AWS, where he focuses on helping industrial energy companies harness cloud, AI, and analytics to modernise field operations.
Under his leadership, energy firms are now deploying Generative AI, IoT, and predictive analytics to gain a real-time, contextual understanding of their assets. In practical terms, this has allowed them to prevent unplanned downtime, improve technician response times, and ensure continuity in the most remote and high-stakes locations.
One of his most influential initiatives has been helping North American oil and gas firms transition from reactive maintenance to predictive operations, redefining their cost structure, increasing system availability, and future-proofing their infrastructure. His co-authored publication on this subject has become a go-to reference across the industry, highlighting real-world use cases of AI-driven operational intelligence.
An Authority on Operational Excellence
Shankar Narayanan's journey, from building anti-surge logic on compressor decks to shaping digital strategy in boardrooms, illustrates what happens when deep domain expertise meets visionary execution. His sustained achievements and impact have resulted in his current standing as a top authority on energy systems reliability and industrial transformation. His insights are helping energy operators strengthen their technical foundation in an increasingly competitive global market.
By rethinking control systems, optimising field workflows, and integrating advanced AI across the energy value chain, Narayanan is not just digitising operations; he's enabling a more resilient, responsive, and reliable energy infrastructure for the future.
