

It is not just startup companies looking at using AI in mineral exploration. Improving Exploration Targets – Goldcorp and IBM Watson also claims to have a deal with an unnamed publicly listed African exploration company to drill a few test holes based on the companies AI targeting. The gold producer plans to perform preliminary drill testing as soon as is logistically possible. Last month the Jerritt Canyon project announced they used Goldspot Discoveries Inc’s AI to analysis all geological data they have about the currently un-mined parts of their claim and information about where they have previously found gold in the region to identify target zones that might contain gold. The first major publicly announced test of their system will be happening in the near future at the Jerritt Canyon mine. They claim in their test they were able to predict 86% of the existing gold deposits in the Abitibi gold belt region of Canada using data such as geological, topography, and mineralogy from just 4 percent of total surface area. The company claims that the current practice of trying to find gold deposits is more of an art than a science, and they plan to change that with machine learning as they explain in their video. uses AI to try to improve mineral exploration. Gold Exploration – Goldspot Discoveries Inc. Applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to the task of mineral prospecting and exploration is a very new phenomenon, which is gaining interest in the industryĪt the 2017 Disrupt Mining event in Toronto, Canada, two of the five finalists were companies focused on using machine learning in mining: Kore Geosystems and Goldspot Discovery. A company could build the most aggressively automated and impressively efficient operation and it would be worthless unless there were good material in the ground to extract. This mineral exploration step is critical to mining operations.

The first step is finding a place to mine. That said, this article will look at how AI is being used to find ground to mine and how AI is being used to improve mine operations.

Mining is a large and diverse industry with significantly different techniques and technologies used depending on what material is being extracted, so it difficult to make sweeping statements that fully encompass the entire sector.
