Panel 1 Key Takeaways: Rethinking technology adoption in mining
Key insight: Knowing when to invest
One of the key insights that came out of both the discussion and the questions from the audience was in relation to when to invest in technology. While it was acknowledged that any transformation change takes a level of risk, the unique challenges and big investments related to integrating technology can create real disincentives.
How does a leader plan for the potential for technology to either fail or take longer than anticipated to start generating the value promised?
It speaks to key decisions that need to be made early in the process about sharing risk in development, opportunities for collaboration, scaling up or staging integration as well as the pros and cons of being a first mover or the second to act.
Biggest challenge: Organisational alignment
The challenge that seems to be underestimated is getting alignment across the team that will be necessary to make technology work. Across mining companies that means cross functional teams including IT, finance and operations. All leaders need to be on board with the objective, risk, and benefits as well as the roles their respective teams will play, from the beginning. Often technology requires a system wide transformation.
Biggest opportunity: Embracing hybrid skills
I was really interested in ideas that reflected new thinking in how people are recruited into mining companies. The concept of hybrid skill sets. One example given was to find data analysts who are interested in rocks. People who may not have trained in mining disciplines but are great problem solvers and are not scared of technology. We have to remember the next generation of professionals have been raised in a digital world and will potentially have a more open mind to technology. How do we best make use of this capability when planning for new technology adoption?
The issue is that lots of industries are looking for the same people and competition is fierce. What's the point of difference the mining industry can create to compete for this talent? And what does it mean for recruitment strategies and methods?
Recurring theme: Time as a critical factor
A key recurring theme was 'time'. Bearing in mind technologies could be as simple as a change to a single piece of equipment on an existing mine or an entirely new system behind a new mining operation, there is also a difference in the timescale needed to develop and prove the benefits. The panel talked about everything from a few days to turn around geoscience data to 10 years or more to do a collaborative research project with academia and industry and then progressively commercialised through long term testing and scaling up. How mining companies will think about the temporal drivers for change will of course depend upon their context - what's motivating technology shift and how quickly do they need to respond.
Look for more insights from our 2026 Series Moderator Joanne Pafumi after each panel discussion.
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