Mining Moves Slower Than Its Conditions Suggest

Ironically, mining has the conditions AI loves. 

Repetitive workflows. Structured processes. Expensive inefficiencies. Measurable KPIs. Massive sensor data. On paper, mining is one of the most fertile environments for optimisation, forecasting, anomaly detection, and automation that exists in any industry.

And yet we move slower than almost everyone.

It's tempting to point to heavy assets and high-risk work as the reason. But aviation runs on heavy assets and risk too, and has been using AI for predictive maintenance and flight optimisation for years. Banking runs fraud detection at the millisecond level. Logistics has rebuilt itself around supply-chain optimisation. The constraints we lean on aren't unique to us.

What could the next decade look like? Digital twins of sites. AI assistance for schedulers and planners. Defect forecasting. Shift optimisation models working alongside supervisors. Live safety models that account for FIFO swings, machinery state, and personnel fatigue. None of this is theoretical. The case studies exist in adjacent industries, and parts have been explored in ours.

The friction isn't technical. It's organisational.

Mining sits firmly in what Larry Greiner called coordination: heavy systems, gated approvals, group functions, matrix structures. He described this in 1972, and it's still uncomfortably accurate. It's how the majors got safe and scalable. It's also why small operational improvements that would compound across thousands of cycles can sit in a queue behind decisions ten times their size.

The next phase Greiner described is collaboration: cross-functional teams, decisions made closer to the ground, faster cycles. You can restructure your way there but it can also occur in habits. Most of us don't sit at the tables where capital is allocated. But innovation doesn't only happen there.

A few things front-line and middle managers can do:

• Move decision-making to the lowest level of stakeholders capable of acting on them. 

• Trial small innovations where you have the authority to do so. When something works, share it across departments. 

• Read across industries, not just your own.

• Give time and light to new ideas amongst teams

• Seek innovative thinking as a trait in people you employ

Mining's next phase isn't just built in strategy decks, it's also built in habits.

Jenny Dinh