AI, automation and robots will have a seismic impact on the mining industry

Could humanoid robots eventually replace human rock-drill operators in South Africa’s deep and dangerous mines?

“100%. I think technology will develop to get us there,” was how Harmony Gold CEO Beyers Nel responded when asked this question during an interview on the sidelines of the African Mining Indaba in Cape Town.

“It’s called people-out-of-risk technologies. How do we get people out of harm’s way?”

Viewed through this prism, robots will be an extension of mechanisation trends which have already delivered huge advances in mine health, safety and productivity. Machines have already replaced human rock-drill operators in many shafts, removing humans from a potentially lethal danger zone.

The pace of technology on this front is accelerating at a blistering pace and such scenarios are no longer the realm of science fiction.

According to Counterpoint Research, global humanoid robot installations reached 16,000 units in 2025, with China unsurprisingly accounting for more than 80% of this android total.

Read more: Rise of the machines, 2025 genesis year for humanoid robot production with 16,000

This marked the “genesis year” for humanoid robots – the first year of mass production and commercialisation. And the numbers look set to swell from this base.

AI, robots, automation – these linked trends are about to shake the global economy and the impact on the mining sector will be seismic.

On one front, it will be a future driver of demand for the minerals and metals that miners produce. AI and data centres require mother lodes of energy and metals.

“AI requires a lot of electricity and so that is driving a lot of the energy demand. For PGMs there is demand from data storage. And material technology is going to change and it will drive PGM demand going forward,” Sibanye-Stillwater Richard Stewart told Daily Maverick.

And an S&P Global report recently identified another looming vector of demand, notably for copper – the rise of the robot.

“There is much variance in projections for their scale by 2040 – varying from tens of millions to hundreds of millions to a billion or more. Whatever the actual number, these humanoids will not just be wired – but heavily wired – with copper,” it said.

Read more: S&P sees looming copper shortages posing systemic risk to global economy

Meeting that demand will mean more metals need to be discovered and mined, and this in turn will require the productivity boost of AI and robotics.

Helping human miners do their job safer and better

Not all mining executives see robot rock-drill operators in the future.

“We shouldn’t see AI as a replacement for people, it should complement people to do their jobs better. I don’t see humanoid robots coming in,” Sibanye’s Stewart said.

Safety is one area where AI and related technologies are and will be harnessed by the mining sector.

“Safety is a huge application. We have AI cameras in high-risk areas that are monitoring are people to see if they are wearing PPE correctly and if they are not it actually notifies them and blocks them from entering a high-risk area,” Stewart said.

The applications are across the board.

Seelan Gobalsamy, the CEO of Omnia, which has an explosives unit for mining, told Daily Maverick at the indaba that “we want to be able to accurately predict the fragmentation of rock and the quality of that fragmentation... to ultimately improve productivity.”

And figuring out what the shards of rock tell us will be enabled by the tools of AI and its data sets.

Harmony’s Nel said the data gathered through AI tools could be updated constantly to assist each mining shift with knowledge about the current conditions in the mine.

“What we have in Harmony is something running where we’ve got all the data points at the various mines and we monitor millions of data points on a continuous basis,” he said.

This is fed into a data management centre and “this information gets collated, and it gets dash-boarded on a real-time information dashboard, and then printed, and provides details for every miner that goes underground. And it’s an AI tool that is collecting our data.”

This is a massive undertaking as Harmony can have thousands of miners underground at a time and operates Mponeng, the world’s deepest mine which reaches depths of about 4km.

That also points to the fact that future is already here at some mines. Another striking example is Anglo American’s Quellaveco copper mine in Peru, which is fully automated and digitised.

“The trucks and the process plant are fully automated, and there is an integrated control unit that runs the whole of the mine, all of the functions from geology to mining. And by and large, we drive the mine by computer,” Anglo CEO Duncan Wanblad told Daily Maverick.

And demand for the copper from that mine is set to explode – in part because of the unfolding AI revolution. DM