Eduardo Coloma

CEO, Maptek

Maptek CEO Eduardo Coloma began working for Maptek 25 years ago in sales and technical support services in South America. He then moved to Perth, Western Australia in 2012 as Sales Manager for the Western Australian region, Mine Planning Business Manager and Evolution Global Product Manager.

Eduardo has knowledge and experience in optimisation, mine design and scheduling especially for open pit metalliferous deposits. He holds a Civil, Industrial and Mining Engineering degree from the University of Antofagasta, Chile and completed an Executive MBA at Adolfo Ibáñez University in 2008. 

Eduardo's keynote title and synopsis:

Beyond the Tipping Point: From Mammoths to Agents

 Mining has long advanced through physical scale - bigger trucks, deeper pits, faster drills. But in today's era of massive data flows and automation, traditional scaling strategies are delivering diminishing returns. Are we still scaling in the right direction? 

This presentation explores several critical inflection points, drawing on insights from evolutionary biology and computational scaling laws to challenge long-standing assumptions. Mining must move beyond brute-force scaling towards systems that are adaptive, interconnected, and intelligent. At the heart of this shift lies a deeper transformation - from deterministic approaches to probabilistic thinking. Mining operations are complex systems with emergent behaviours, and managing them requires moving beyond linear cause and effect models. 

The future lies in building intelligent agents that interpret uncertainty, learn from context, and respond with nuance. By balancing computer power, algorithms, and data quality, this talk outlines a new blueprint for how intelligence can evolve within technical mining systems. It's not about automating what we already know - it's about evolving how we think, plan, and act in complexity. 

This is the end of scaling by size. Its the beginning of scaling by intelligence.