The artificial intelligence (AI) was born with the development of hardware and software such as computer, machine translation and natural language processing. Because of its outstanding capacities including prediction, analysis, decision making,and computing, it has begun to lead the progress of industry 4.0 and promoted the advances of the petroleum industry. This article begins by introducing several key AI events in the petroleum industry, then narrates the creative collaboration between the world-leading oil companies and the internet companies, as well as the current level of development of AI. It is discovered that the application of AI has been implemented throughout the upstream (exploration, development, production) to the downstream(management, sales, investment) channel, and has dramatically increased the efficiency and profit of the industry. However, the present specialized AI is still at a noticeable distance from the general AI level. The authors believe that the AI development of the industry requests higher capacities of the professionals adept at professional knowledge and skills, with advanced mathematical capacity and level of programming. Meanwhile, the future advancement of AI in the petroleum industry shall be first based on the progress of the industry itself plus the aid of the AI techniques, especially optimized prediction and automation, so as to finally form an intelligent internet of merchandises that connects the entire industry chain.