The world’s biggest mining company is competing with Big Tech to hire high-level AI talent. Johan van Jaarsveld, chief technology officer at BHP, told Semafor the company recently built a dedicated AI team to find new ways of making the company’s operations more efficient.
AI can be useful for identifying new mineral deposits, but the development time for new mines is so long that for now AI-driven exploration isn’t a focus for the team; instead, he said, “we identify which domains give us the biggest wins the quickest,” which for now means steps like streamlining the company’s maintenance operations and making more strategic decisions about where and how to conduct blasting in mines.
There aren’t many AI programmers who also understand geology, he said, which makes hiring a challenge. “We’re more in competition with tech companies than we are with other mining companies,” he said. “It’s been really hard to build this team, so we incentivize them properly. When we find people we need to keep them.”