Argentine oil and gas company Pluspetrol has won the SAP Innovation Tournament Americas 2026 – Agentic Edition after developing an AI agent designed to anticipate material availability for well drilling, helping to avoid additional costs and operational delays.
Argentine oil and gas company Pluspetrol has won the SAP Innovation Tournament Americas 2026 – Agentic Edition, an initiative designed to help companies turn specific operational challenges into Artificial Intelligence agents with measurable business impact.
For this edition, participants were challenged to develop agents using SAP Joule Studio to solve real operational problems within 48 hours.
The awards for the Argentine leg of the competition were presented during SAP NOW AI Tour Argentina 2026, held at La Rural in Buenos Aires.
In the weeks leading up to the competition, participating companies received training, mentoring and support from SAP experts and innovation specialists. Teams then had 48 hours to identify a real business problem, design a solution and develop a proof of concept with demonstrable operational potential.
The two finalists in Argentina were telecommunications company Personal and oil and gas company Pluspetrol, with Pluspetrol named the winner.
Two agents tackle real business challenges
Personal presented a solution designed to maximise the use of VAT tax credits through an agent that can anticipate and accelerate the management of high-value invoices during the monthly closing process.
The tool identifies invoices that are ready to be posted and those requiring additional management for the tax credit to be calculated in the corresponding period, generating alerts and co-ordinating the necessary actions.
According to SAP, this can help optimise financial processes, improve management times and enable more efficient use of company resources.
For Pluspetrol, a lack of advance visibility into material availability can lead to stock shortages, urgent purchases, additional costs and delays in drilling wells grouped into multiple-well drilling platforms known as PADs.
The company developed an agent that assists planners by monitoring a 200-day horizon. It detects material gaps, calculates available coverage based on existing stock, open purchase orders and materials remaining from previous projects, recommends the best alternative and executes planned orders, helping to prevent the problem from reaching the well.
Competition expands across the region
This is the third edition of the tournament in Latin America, with the format also having been replicated in the US.
The winner of the previous edition, Aeropuertos Argentina 2000, presented its solution during the keynote at SAPPHIRE 2026 in Orlando, Florida, becoming the first Latin American company to reach that stage.
“The Innovation Tournament shows every year that it is possible for business and technology teams to work together to identify opportunities, develop solutions and accelerate the impact of emerging technologies on operations,” said Fernanda Pérez, Country Manager of SAP Argentina. “This tournament once again demonstrated that innovation is measured by its ability to generate concrete business results.”
