Industry reports confirm that while the unconventional wells drilling and completion operations have achieved significant efficiency gains, which translated into steep cost reductions, the production operations costs remained largely flat. The authors provide a quick review of the above and discuss technologies aimed at addressing this situation including machine learning, AI and physics-based modeling. The latter has been the cornerstone for production optimization since the early days of oil and gas exploitation, however, it has been uneconomical for systematic use in unconventional wells and is applied to only a small fraction of the large number of active wells. This is mainly due to their complex completions, which makes modeling a tedious and resource intensive task. Data science promises faster and nimbler solutions, however, while advanced techniques such as deep learning have achieved impressive advances in many areas like face and speech recognition, they remain mostly rooted in pattern recognition, with no grasp of cause and effect, which limits the type of problems they can successfully resolve. This paper will discuss the above solutions and limitations and presents a novel physics-based approach that would be economical for widespread deployment.