A reflection presented by MISA Group at the Orléans Conference, France – October 17, 2025
On October 17, in Orléans, France, MISA Group spoke at an international conference to explore a major and timely issue: the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the mining industry. While the performance gains enabled by AI are clear, they often overshadow a less visible dimension, its profound influence on the identity and practices of mining operators.
As digital transformation accelerates across the mining sector, artificial intelligence is emerging as a key driver of innovation and performance. Beyond its technological benefits, however, AI is fundamentally reshaping the role of humans in the mine of the future, an issue that lies at the very heart of MISA Group’s approach.
AI: A Driver of a New Operational Culture
For MISA Group, artificial intelligence is not merely a technology; it is a catalyst for evolution. It transforms best practices in data management processes, including data collection, transmission, analysis, and dissemination, as well as the way mining teams think, collaborate, and make decisions.
Any AI initiative rests on a solid foundation: data and the management of its quality. In the complex environments of mining sites, data originates from equipment, people, processes, and the interactions among connected systems. To be fully leveraged, this data must be structured, contextualized, and secured, essential prerequisites for effective data quality management.
Implementing a complete data management value chain, from data creation to strategic use, is both an engineering challenge and an organizational culture shift that requires time and discipline. Based on the experience of MISA Group’s experts, such deployments typically take 20 to 24 months before delivering tangible results.
Toward the Autonomous Mine: A Vision Advanced by MISA Group
This vision is embodied in the concept of the autonomous mine, which MISA Group has actively promoted within its innovation network since 2019.
AI is viewed as a core technological building block, alongside instrumentation and connectivity, to enhance the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of mining operations.
The goal is to enable the industry to make faster, better-informed decisions based on predictive models and continuous learning systems, while maintaining enlightened human governance, and perhaps one day, governance we might even describe as conscious.
Redefining Mining Expertise
This technological transition is bringing about a profound transformation in mining expertise. Access to data and the accumulation of massive datasets unlock the exceptional potential of data-processing technologies, particularly AI, and pave the way for the design of models built on binary logic. It is here that we enter a new environment, a new territory. Environment, like territory, is a powerful marker of identity.
By integrating their knowledge and experience into digital systems based on binary logic (0/1, true/false, yes/no), the industry is beginning the codification of mining industrial know-how.
For MISA Group, this evolution will lead to new paradigms in how human knowledge and expertise are deployed, knowledge that is increasingly stored, with the prospect that it may one day be understood and reimagined by more sophisticated agents, albeit within the binary logic of a digital environment. Cinematic references on this subject abound, but we will refrain from going down that path in order to remain focused on our discussion.
Returning to the mining context, this perspective challenges the role of humans within operational processes. For the time being, we may take some comfort in the fact that this intelligence, by definition artificial, still produces a significant number of hallucinations. Learning, however, is progressing rapidly, at the speed of processor performance, generating agents that are increasingly capable of managing expertise, reasoning, and creativity within their specific environments.
As systems become capable of learning from operators, the latter must more than ever emphasize the qualities that are uniquely human: creativity, complex problem-solving, intuition, and adaptability, in short, everything that cannot be reduced to probability management within a binary logic.
The mine of the future will therefore be both intelligent and human, with operators playing a central role in supervision, strategy, and continuous innovation. Within a digital environment, human value will be defined by the capacity to demonstrate ever-greater humanism.
Québec Leadership in International Dialogue
Groupe MISA Group’s presentation in Orléans highlighted Québec’s expertise in mining innovation, particularly in the integration of emerging technologies and the responsible management of change.
MISA Group’s contribution generated strong interest among European participants, especially regarding the coexistence of artificial intelligence and human intelligence, as well as the ethical, social, and organizational implications of digital transformation.
Through this dialogue, MISA Group reaffirmed its mission: to accelerate the adoption of innovative technological solutions that support the competitiveness, sustainability, and human dimension of the mining industry.
A More Human Mine in a More Digital World
Artificial intelligence is redefining the boundaries of the mining sector, but it does not replace humans, it elevates them into a new role.
Through initiatives led by MISA Group, Québec is positioning itself as a leader in bridging technology and humanity, industrial performance and social responsibility.
In an increasingly connected mining world, the future belongs to those who can combine machine intelligence with human intelligence, to build together a mine that is more sustainable, more intelligent, and profoundly human.
