Mining Technology: AI as the Next Frontier

I was recently asked by a venture capital firm to provide expert advice on an investment plan they’d created for investing in mining technology. They’d chosen 12 areas of mining where technology had recently improved a process or system, and they’d completed a market analysis on the leading companies within those areas. Their intent was to invest in a small- to medium-sized company with the view to injecting capital to improve their product or services, and then sell the now-improved company and its product or service to a large corporation, OEM, or even miner.

At the meeting we rated and ranked the various technologies they'd short-listed, and then reviewed target companies currently operating in those technology pillars. At the end of the exercise, they asked me a question that caused me to pause for thought – “Are there any other technologies out there that we’ve missed?” I must admit it made me think – so much so I said I’d have to get back to them.

After thinking about it overnight and reviewing the list again, I had to admit there was nothing out there that I knew of that was going to be the next big “thing” in mining. If there was, whoever was working on it was keeping it very quiet. Something not easily done in the mining industry. Granted, there are moves towards seabed and space mining, though they are a spin on existing mining methods but in new (harsher) environments and many, many years away from fruition. There’s obviously BEV technology and green hydrogen, though these were technologies they’d flagged as being low maturity with high barriers to market entry. But one thought did come to mind.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a technology that one does not usually associate with mining. Tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are what comes to mind first, as is OpenAI and its ChatGPT product that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to give you answers to just about any question you can think of (though don’t always believe what it tells you). Generative AI, like ChatGPT, where answers are “generated” is only one branch of AI. There are other branches such as computer vision, machine learning and the use of deep, neural networks that could provide benefit to many mining processes and systems.

Mining at its core produces a lot of data, sometimes overwhelming amounts. Any tool that can help sift through that data and highlight the nuggets (pun intended) is a tool worth using. Machine learning and neural networks are two such aspects of AI that can tackle this challenge with comparative ease. Computer vision is already making its way into mining, mainly within processing plants in areas where a human would normally keep an eye on things.

So, with the above in mind, I went back to the venture capital firm and told them that I couldn’t think of any emerging, ground-breaking technology that was on the horizon, but there was a sound case for investing in AI. My recommendation to them was to look at those companies within the technology pillars they had already identified and find those that were looking at how AI could be incorporated into their existing or new products. It’s those companies that are going to rise head and shoulders above the rest given the advantage AI (if done right) will give them.

In his 2023 book The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman speaks of technology coming in waves with history demonstrating there’s been several waves over the past 500 years (and even way back to Neanderthal times) – Gutenberg’s printing press, Lenoir’s internal combustion engine, and most recently for AI, the ability to print smaller and smaller capacitors onto integrated circuits (computer chips). AI in mining may not be so much a wave, but the tide is certainly turning.