Digital transformation is essential for a resilient, durable, and sustainable mining sector. Geopolitical volatility and trade uncertainties are disrupting supply chains, while the industry grapples with the challenges of meeting the soaring demand for minerals essential for the energy transition. 

Existing deposits are being exhausted and new deposits are increasingly more difficult and expensive to discover. In 2015, McKinsey & Company reported that worldwide mining operations were 28% less productive than they were a decade prior, even after adjusting for declining ore grades.² Nearly a decade later, the shortage now impacts the availability of metals creating a potential risk for a near-term supply shortfall, particularly for copper, lithium, and cobalt vital to the energy transition. There is an expected supply deficit in critical minerals like copper with a potential shortfall of 9.9 million tons by 2035.³ 

The mining industry also faces a chronic labor shortage which adds even more to its challenges, with 86% of mining executives finding it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain necessary talent.⁴ Amidst these complexities, mining companies are striving to balance productivity and profitability with purpose using cloud-based platforms, the Internet of Things (IoT), mixed reality, and more recently, generative AI.  

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Accelerating digital transformation

In the December 2023 blog, I discussed how mining companies are adopting digital technologies to enable business agility, drive efficiency, and accelerate innovation across the entire mining value chain, from exploration and extraction to processing and transportation. While these efforts have traditionally centered around specific business outcomes, current trends emphasize broader goals such as corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets and the transition to net-zero emissions. 

Meeting these goals requires a strong data foundation, digital effectiveness, and digital maturity. Transformation starts with technology-savvy leaders who have a grounding in AI and a focus on sustainability. With a vision informed by a clear understanding of their organization’s challenges and opportunities, effective leaders can take a leap forward on their innovation roadmap with solutions like Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, which provides a single, flexible platform for databases, analytics, AI, and data governance.  

Digital maturity deepens with an empowered, skilled workforce that harnesses AI to make informed decisions and streamline repetitive tasks, gaining more time for value-added activities. For example, in my last blog, I shared how Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides combines generative AI with mixed reality to help frontline workers in industrial settings complete complex tasks and resolve problems faster for minimal downtime and accelerated learning. 

Exploring innovation with a future-ready mindset 

At Microsoft, our enduring mission is to “empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.” We are privileged to work with a partner ecosystem that shares our vision.  

Digital innovation that stays relevant over time integrates people, processes, technology, and information. Multinational Japanese firm Asahi Kasei Group and ZEAL Corporation showcased that approach by implementing a data management platform based on Microsoft Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. The platform unifies 1,200 systems across multiple diverse operations such chemicals, healthcare, electronics, construction, materials, services, and engineering. By eliminating data silos, the team can gain new insights that unlock business advantages.

Siemens is another great example of enabling people to achieve more. To empower employees, the company created an AI-powered collaboration app based on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Teams. Siemens aimed to enhance innovation, efficiency, and problem-solving agility by connecting field and shop floor workers with operations and engineering teams. Now, frontline workers who find problems in the design and manufacturing process can easily connect with engineers to resolve them. 

Employees can receive notifications, create problem reports, and collaborate on tasks on any device. The app provides preconfigured industrial machinery solutions and accelerates knowledge-sharing with an AI-powered natural language interface. For instance, employees can report issues in their own language, which is automatically translated into a common language. 

In my final example, Schieder Electric wanted to speed innovation for key goals such as reducing carbon emissions. With a vast portfolio of connected devices, solutions, and services, AI has become essential for generating data-driven insights and actions The company is using multiple AI services to fast-track innovation, including Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, Azure OpenAI, and Azure Machine Learning. Schneider Electric is using Copilot to automate routine tasks and to offer intelligent code suggestions that streamline programmable logic controller (PLC) programming. The company has also created bots to help with customer service and financial analysis. 

Creating durable innovation for a sustainable future 

Digital transformation can be a long journey, and the pressing issues of today can sometimes overshadow our efforts toward growth and innovation. For durable innovation, we incorporate the McKinsey Three Horizons Model into our digital transformation roadmaps. 

The model provides a structured approach that miners can use to allocate resources effectively, balancing immediate business needs with sustained innovation for future success. Organizations are encouraged to explore new markets and invest in business models, products, and technologies that align innovation programs with future challenges and growth opportunities. As a framework for strategic innovation and growth, Three Horizons Model can support miners during times of change, disruption, and uncertainty.   

In addition to innovation initiatives, we consider critical aspects such as user adoption, change management, change fatigue, organizational capabilities, culture transformation, workforce reskilling, and governance. These considerations are vital for futureproofing the mining enterprise and sustaining digital and AI innovation. 

How Microsoft can help

Digital transformation and AI adoption are poised to revolutionize the mining industry in the next decade and beyond. Microsoft technologies are already making a significant impact, with improvements in safety, productivity, profitability, safety, health, and environmental performance. From clarifying your vision for innovation and identifying top challenges to creating your solution roadmap, a disciplined approach is crucial for continuing this momentum. 

The digital sustainable mine of the future integrates physical, digital, and sustainable elements with information, innovation, and human ingenuity. The adaptive, resilient, forward-thinking mine offers a customizable reference model and roadmap to help mining organizations achieve their vision for the future. 

That vision isn’t just about the outcome, or business impact—it’s about investing in the processes and technologies that enable the mining industry to adapt to change and help us all accelerate toward a sustainable tomorrow.  

Learn more about Microsoft solutions

• Microsoft for Energy and Resources  
• Microsoft Industry Blogs: Energy and Resources
• Microsoft AI solutions  
• Microsoft Azure AI Services  
• Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform

¹Mining’s top ten ESG trends for 2024, Mining.com.

²Productivity in mining operations: Reversing the downward trend, McKinsey & Company.

³Tracking the trends 2024, Deloitte Global.

⁴Has mining lost its luster? Why talent is moving elsewhere and how to bring them back, McKinsey & Company.

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The renewable energy sector relies on critical minerals including graphite, copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt for batteries and other clean energy technologies. The mining industry plays an essential role in not only fueling and supplying the energy transition, but also in attaining sustainability goals.

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Join Microsoft at the World Mining Congress 2023

Leading mining companies are accelerating the transition to clean energy with digital innovation and implementing ground-breaking solutions with Microsoft technologies that include process automation, cloud migration, predictive analytics, AI, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

I’m looking forward to sharing how companies can leverage AI in the digital sustainable mine of the future at the upcoming World Mining Congress 2023 in Brisbane, Australia. This workshop aims to broaden the discussion beyond technology infrastructure and AI-enabled solutions. For example, a more holistic perspective of AI infrastructure could address the dual challenges of meeting energy demands profitably and efficiently while also driving toward a sustainable future.

First, let’s examine how organizations in the mining industry are stepping up to those challenges.

Transformative solutions for complex challenges

To operate more efficiently and sustainably amid global supply chain disruptions in recent years, mining companies need to decarbonize and bring agility to mission-critical processes like supply chain management. Digital solutions that leverage machine learning and predictive analytics enable faster responses to rapidly changing market conditions and risks that include cybersecurity, geopolitical, and climate events.

The global mining industry is transforming with Microsoft technologies. Sweden’s Sandvik Group, a leader in mining and engineering, wanted to help the mining industry become more sustainable through the adoption of cutting-edge technology. To enable digital transformation, Sandvik developed a remote monitoring solution that provides AI, IoT, and predictive analytics powered by Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Databricks, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Synapse Analytics. The solution collects and analyzes data from hundreds of sensors, provides actionable insights into equipment performance and status, and helps Sandvik improve predictive maintenance on machines. As a result, its customers can benefit from improved productivity, safety, and energy and fuel efficiency.

Metinvest Holdings in Ukraine is also using Microsoft technology to make significant operational improvements. To increase energy efficiency, Metinvest implemented an AI solution with Azure Data Factory, Azure Machine Learning, and Power BI that was able to predict and control the silicon content of iron to reduce fuel consumption in blast furnaces. The project began by improving fuel-efficiency in blast-furnaces, with plans to embed digital solutions throughout the firm’s value chain.

Building a digital sustainable mine of the future

These customer stories touch on common themes that organizations face on their net-zero journeys. Building the mine of the future requires more than digitizing established processes, as I explained in this recent white paper, “Empowering the Mining Industry.” The complexity of optimizing across interdependent mining and sustainability priorities requires more than standalone applications. We can no longer rely on pencil and paper, simple spreadsheets, or even a collection of industry-specific applications. Optimizing the mine of the future will require each mine to operate as an Intelligence Driven Organization (IDO) with a system of intelligence layer that spans not only the enterprise but interconnects with the greater extended enterprise and ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and customers.

AI and the IDO model are important tools for overcoming the daunting challenge of meeting sustainability regulations and stakeholder requirements while delivering climate-smart minerals faster and more cost-effectively.

Collaborating toward a holistic AI infrastructure

Using AI-based solutions and the IDO model to form the digital sustainable mine of the future will empower miners to quickly respond to rapidly changing conditions. These innovations in operational and energy efficiency are a tremendous step forward. But we can’t stop there. We also need to have broader, more holistic discussions around AI infrastructure. The transition to a cleaner, sustainable future requires our collective efforts to accelerate climate goals while supporting business goals for mining.

To help move toward a shared definition, Microsoft offers a point of view for the digital sustainable mine of the future, which includes not only the technology foundation but also an integrated model that addresses both business and sustainability needs.

The digital sustainable mine of the future isn’t built on technology alone. It relies on scaffolding that includes aligned policy makers, the facilitation of ongoing research, and stakeholders that provide insights that build understanding, inform decisions, and drive effective actions. The infrastructure for AI must also inform focused investment to achieve mission, government, community, and business goals. There must be a regulatory environment in place for the effective and ethical use of AI. Trust must be earned and maintained through verification, validation, traceability, auditability, and accountability. And finally, an infrastructure for AI must effectively leverage current technology while rapidly adapting to accelerating innovation.

Capabilities and principles for intelligence-driven ecosystems

Operating with a shared framework of capabilities and principles, the infrastructure for AI combines with intelligence-driven organizations to form intelligence driven-ecosystems. Systems of intelligence improve business operations and sustainability in a continuous feedback loop that in turn informs the decisions of policy makers, researchers, stakeholders, investors, and regulators.

This larger and more encompassing vision of the infrastructure for AI enables us to accelerate toward climate goals while also attaining desirable business outcomes for miners. Combining sustainability goals with business outcome is important for mining organizations, who must operate productively and profitably while investing in climate positive projects.

We all share the environmental outcome of our planet. By working together within an intelligence-driven ecosystem, we can move forward toward a sustainable energy future.

Additional resources

• Learn more about how Microsoft works to enable the sustainable growth of renewables in the mining industry.
• 3 key takeaways from CERAWeek 2022 and a cleaner future for the energy transition. 
• Learn more about themes and actions critical for energy transition. 
• Read more about how Microsoft partners with energy companies to accelerate digital transformation.
• Microsoft brings mixed reality and new immersive collaboration tools to industrial metaverse customers.
• Enable your data to do more in the cloud with our energy data manager.
• To learn how to attract, train, and retain employees for your next-generation workforce, visit our transform your workforce employee retention website.
• To learn more about Microsoft for Energy and Resources, visit our future of energy industry solutions website. 

¹EIA projects increases in global energy consumption and emissions through 2050, U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2021.

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To enable the sustainable growth of renewables, the global mining industry is rapidly evolving with a shift toward more efficient, resilient processes. The sector is at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, with mining companies worldwide benefiting from process automation, cloud migration, predictive analytics, AI, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The adoption of these innovations is transforming mining to optimize assets and improve productivity, sustainability, and workplace safety.

Prior to digitization, mining organizations relied mainly on historical data to manage operations. Frontline workers read gauges and recorded values and observations on paper forms. Later, perhaps well after the shift ended, this data was entered into local computers and used to update large status boards. Any insights derived from this data came too late to favorably impact operational, financial, environmental, and safety outcomes. It was like driving down the road while looking into the rearview mirror. Digital transformation is now well established in the mining industry and some companies transformed boldly to advance their digital sustainable mine of the future visions. Others followed an incremental approach, often focusing on specific problems. A few started their digital transformations later and are catching up quickly.

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Digital transformation enables doing more with less

A lot has changed since we published this blog on digital transformation in the mining industry. The past few years have ushered in a series of challenges for mining organizations, from tailings dam failures and license to operate, to COVID-19, and supply chain disruptions. Mining leaders must simultaneously optimize operations across their value chains for multiple goals, constraints, regulations, and stakeholder expectations to make an immediate favorable impact on outcomes. Because of this, mining organizations need new capabilities to respond in real time and even predict future outcomes to prevent problems before they happen.

This urgency is felt across industries, as organizations and their employees worldwide are tasked to do more with less. While most mining organizations have digitized part of their processes and equipment, many mining frontline workers continue to struggle with existing paper-based and manual processes. Both business and IT departments grapple with insufficient network connectivity, capacity, and reliability,

Increasing the pace of innovation

Increasingly, mining operations are adding digital sensors and upgrading networks to deliver real-time data for better business insights and decisions. As miners purchase and deploy new equipment, especially autonomous equipment, it often comes with a host of sensors. In addition, mining operations are selectively retrofitting sensors on movable and fixed legacy equipment. Although these sensors provide accurate, detailed, and reliable data in real time, sensors alone aren’t enough to provide the insights needed to transform operations.

To gain rapid insights across remote locations, Swedish mining company Boliden connected its hardware and systems including 500 cameras and thousands of below and above-ground sensors to Microsoft Azure. Using services such as Azure Stack Edge, Azure IoT Edge, and Computer Vision, Boliden can monitor its connected assets and mining sites around the clock. As a result, the organization has gained rapid visualization and detailed performance, productivity, and hazard insights at scale.

Mining companies are also installing and expanding digital networks across their operations and throughout processing plants including a combination of cellular, coaxial cable, ethernet, and fiber. Since mine sites cover large areas and their configuration and working areas frequently change, wired networks aren’t ideal. Larger mining operations are installing wireless private Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC) networks, enabling computing capability on the network edge at the mine or plant site under the mining operation’s control. Private MEC enables powerful local data processing to meet latency, privacy, and security requirements.

Azure private MEC includes network functions, applications, and edge-optimized Azure services to deliver high-performance, ultra-low latency capabilities that meet the demanding needs of mining operations. Miners can leverage the Azure global cloud platform, connectivity, and ecosystem of partners to develop and deploy enterprise solutions as fully managed services across a broad range of computing platforms.

Improving insights, sustainability, and safety

Using data and insights made available over improved digital networks, mining operations can meet their toughest challenges. Engineering teams can design and build better water management systems and safer tailings dams. Operations teams can improve energy efficiency and lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while operating safely, reliably, and efficiently. Frontline workers no longer need to read gauges and record values and observations on paper forms or in scattered spreadsheets. And all workers have the information they need to know what is happening and what to do next.

By choosing the right technologies, organizations can improve safety and productivity, even when facing daunting challenges like COVID-19. When safety restrictions limited travel and staff at mining sites, Australian mining firm BHP took advantage of Microsoft mixed reality and IoT technologies to deliver support and training to remote field workers.

Optimizing remote operations

Many remote locations have limited data network infrastructure with low bandwidth and frequent outages which impedes exchanging data with corporate offices and accessing internet resources. Mining operations that would like to benefit from the capabilities of cloud-enabled solutions are unable to do so, and mining executives make decisions affecting corporate performance and compliance based on incomplete data.

Innovative mining companies are employing creative approaches for data networking infrastructure like partnering with national network providers and governments as well as local communities and indigenous peoples to install new modern data networks for the benefit of all. Where existing data network infrastructure is insufficient or unreliable, some mining organizations are also utilizing satellites as their backup data networks.

Azure Space makes cloud connectivity and computing accessible for companies in many industries including mining and provides powerful connectivity, analytics, and emulation capabilities that enable organizations to maintain business continuity across globally disperse operations. To operate their own satellites, Azure Orbital Ground Station provides low-latency connection between an organization’s satellites and Azure. Mining organizations can extend satellite communications coverage through a global partner ecosystem of ground station networks and cloud modems as well as telemetry, tracking, and control functions. 

The digital sustainable mine of the future

Clean energy has become the fastest-growing segment of demand for critical minerals. For the mining industry, it means adopting digital technologies is more important than ever to meet this demand while navigating market volatility, supply chain challenges, sustainability commitments, geopolitical risks, and labor shortages. Mining industry leaders are working with Microsoft to digitize and transition to clean in a secure, sustainable, and resilient way. With technology, innovation, and collaboration, together we can accelerate this transformative journey toward the digital, sustainable mine of the future.

Learn more

• Read about how FLSmidth is working to enable customers to build zero-emissions mining and cement plants.
• Learn more about themes and actions critical for energy transition.
• Read more about how Microsoft partners with energy companies to accelerate digital transformation.
• To learn more about Microsoft for Energy and Resources, visit our future of energy industry solutions website.

¹Climate-Smart Mining: Minerals for Climate Action, World Bank Group.

²The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, International Energy Agency.

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