How an Oilfield Equipment Company Runs Three Defenses From One Platform with Adaptive Security
3,000+
malicious emails surfaced per year
4,000+
in-the-moment AI policy coaching moments
~1 min
to connect email security, with AI governance rolled out in ~5 minutes
“You're providing me three things I'm not getting anywhere else, all in one dashboard. For a small team, that's a no-brainer.”
About the Oilfield Equipment Company
The company is a leading manufacturer and provider of mud pump systems and expendables in the US land drilling market. Its equipment reaches a large majority of operating rigs across US shale plays, and its product brands are known for reducing downtime and keeping crews safe in demanding drilling environments. The company also operates internationally, with a presence across North America, the Middle East, and South Asia.
Challenge
Email security and shadow AI risks they didn't see
The company's VP of Information Technology leads a deliberately small IT team, and more than half of his job is now security. As the company moved to a new managed-security arrangement, he set out to close the gaps he expected it to leave, starting with Adaptive's awareness training and phishing simulations. Beyond those solutions, he found that two of his biggest exposures were ones he could not see at all: advanced phishing slipping past his email filters, and employees using AI tools he had no way to track.
“IT has evolved, and I don't love it, but more than 50 percent of my job is security now. For a small team, having everything in one place to show me the data at a glance is invaluable.”
The Turning Point
Email: over 100 threats caught before he signed
Their VP of IT did not have to take the results on faith. Before he committed to anything, a two-week email security trial surfaced more than a hundred malicious emails that had already reached inboxes past his existing filters, a gap he had assumed did not exist.
“The email proof of concept showed me over a hundred phishing emails in two weeks that got through, that the existing filtering didn't catch. Being able to witness the value before signing anything is what sealed the deal.”
What made it stick was how the email agent explained its reasoning. Every flagged email comes with a plain-language explanation and a confidence score, so the VP of IT can trust the clear-cut verdicts at a glance instead of reopening each one.
“When it's 100 percent, it's 100 percent. I'm not going to second-guess it. Having that summary and the confidence score saves me from reading into every single one.”
AI governance: seeing shadow AI for the first time
The AI side was just as eye-opening. The first time the VP of IT saw the risky prompts employees were entering, he realized how much AI use was happening with no oversight, much of it running through personal ChatGPT and Claude accounts outside the company tenant. A worry that had been nagging at the back of his mind was suddenly right in front of him, and it was the push he needed to update the company's AI policy.
“The first time I saw a risky prompt, I thought, this is insane. People were going outside the tenant to personal accounts, and seeing how much it was being used moved it from the back of my mind to the front.”
Solution
SAT, email security, and AI governance in one place
Deployment was fast, with email security taking about a minute and rolling out AI governance taking five. Day to day, email agents do the first pass by clearing the high-confidence threats in bulk and leaving the security team with a small handful of edge cases. The email agents aren't just catching traditional-style phishing attacks; they're also removing AI-age tactics like calendar-invite drops.
On the AI governance side, the VP of IT uses the visibility to see which tools people reach for and whether they are signed in with personal or corporate accounts, while in-the-moment banners coach employees toward approved tools. He is turning what he found into a formal AI policy for his CEO, with a plan to steer the company onto its sanctioned assistant.
“Now I can take the Adaptive data to the CEO and say, here's what's going on, and here's what we need to do.”
For a team this size, having phishing simulations, awareness training, email security, and AI governance in one place, easy to install, integrate, and manage, is the difference between keeping up and falling behind in the age of AI.
Results
Emails stopped, time saved, AI risk surfaced
The wins are quantitative. Adaptive now catches 3,000+ malicious emails a year that existing filters let through. The agent-based triage turned slow manual review into a quick scan, giving a stretched team its time back. And AI governance has delivered more than 4,000 in-context coaching moments that steer employees toward approved tools, while giving the VP of IT the data to make the case for a company-wide AI policy.
The VP of IT keeps coming back to one thing: a platform that moves as fast as the threats do.
“They're moving so much faster than everybody else in the field. I'll mention something, and the response is, we'll have that to you next week.”
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