At the Resourcing Tomorrow 2025 conference, held in London earlier this month, a key discussion centred around the opportunities for the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) seeks to solve the mining sector’s problems.
Mark O’Brien, General Manager for digital technology and innovation of CITIC Pacific Mining (OTCQB:CTPCY), says mining needs to remain pragmatic and focus on solving problems.
“There’s this whole area of operations research where a lot of these problems are being solved using fundamental mathematical solutions that are much quicker, much cheaper, and probably a better bang for buck in terms of how you solve them,” O’Brien says at the London event.
Still, O’Brien noted there is a corner needing to be turned.
“I think we are in a bit of a transition period. A lot of the young people coming through are definitely [AI] natives.”
Swedish metals producer Boliden (FRA:BWJ) AI program manager Rasmus Tammia says mining operating technology is designed and built to be robust for a decade or more could constrain IT innovation.
“That holds us back severely,” Tammia says.
“There’s a reason why these consumer products from Apple, Microsoft and Google have so many incremental updates.
“Whereas we tell our mining vendors and suppliers these [machines and operating systems] are going to have to work for many, many years, which slows down product development.”
Tammia says he spent nearly a year doing risk analysis to be able to deploy cloud native AI solutions to mine production sites.
“And the operators were saying, hey, if you’re going to ruin our production we will kill you, so you better be right,” he says.
Both O’Brien and Tammia joined the co-founder of Canada’s Stratum AI, Farzi Yusufali, and Industrial Minerals Association Europe director Dr Aurela Shtiza on a Resourcing Tomorrow panel examining digital transformation in mining.
Shtiza notes that as well as cybersecurity challenges, AI is escalating legal complexity around data-based IP.
“In artificial intelligence, data is power. At some point we have to ask, who owns the data,” Shtiza says.
As previously reported on day eight of the 12 Days of Christmas feature series, AI is rapidly becoming one of mining’s most-talked about and powerful tools.
Mining is considered one of humanity’s oldest endeavours and, despite its age, the industry is at a point where transformation and technological revolution is essential to meet the growing demands for all commodities necessary to the global energy transition.
In exploration, AI systems are analysing geological, geochemical and geophysical datasets at a scale no human team ever could.
Resourcing Tomorrow brings together more than 2,000 C-suite executives, investors, governments, and innovators in London each year. The event, held between 1-3 December, provides a global platform to shape the future of mining, addressing critical minerals, geopolitics, ESG leadership, and cross-sector innovation.