Ever wonder how mining companies dig through mountains of documents to find those gold nuggets of information? We spoke with AgileDD, a tech company shaking things up in the mining sector with their AI-powered document intelligence. They have an approach that mixes the speed of AI with the smarts of human experts to tackle the massive amounts of data locked away in reports and surveys. We talked about how they’re helping companies make smarter decisions, especially when it comes to exploration and figuring out resource estimates, and much more.

Can you provide a brief overview of AgileDD and its mission, particularly as it relates to the mining sector?

AgileDD is a technology company specializing in AI-powered, human-guided document intelligence solutions. Our mission is to bridge the critical gap between human expertise and AI capabilities to transform enterprise decision-making. We enable organizations to process vast document repositories with the speed of artificial intelligence while maintaining the precision of human judgment.

For the mining sector specifically, mining success depends on data-driven decisions, yet critical insights remain trapped in assessment reports with logs and geophysical surveys. AgileDD’s human-guided AI platform transforms these documents into actionable intelligence, helping mining companies make better exploration and investment decisions.

How would you describe AgileDD’s unique approach to combining human expertise with AI in the context of document processing?

AgileDD enables human-guided AI to capture information from documents with both scale and accuracy. Human experts utilize their deep understanding, precedents, and organizational context for decision-making, but they cannot process large volumes of documents. While AI can process thousands or millions of documents in minutes or hours, it cannot be trusted to make mission-critical or business-critical decisions on its own.

Our platform bridges this gap by enabling a partnership between human expertise and AI capabilities, delivering both the scale of AI processing and the accuracy of human judgment.

AgileDD emphasizes “enterprise-grade precision and scale.” What does this mean specifically for mining companies dealing with vast quantities of geological data?

Mining companies and authorities possess vast repositories of valuable information locked in unstructured documents. Enterprise-grade precision and scale means that mining companies can access and process all available data in their document repositories, not just a subset, to inform their decision-making.

This approach ensures that geologists and decision-makers can base their investment decisions on the full set of available data, rapidly accessing everything available in their company and ensuring that decisions are based on all trustable and reliable information wrapped in their documents.

Your website mentions a successful case study with a US gold mining company involving the extraction of geochemical data. Could you elaborate on the specific challenges and how AgileDD helped overcome them?

The key challenge was valuable data trapped in geochemistry and sample tables in PDFs and plain text documents. For instance, Barrick (the US gold mining company) had approximately one million documents containing critical geological information, including surface sample geochemistry and pre-geological information.

The challenge was that when all document data is in unstructured formats, mining companies are unable to get reliable answers to critical questions like “Give me the 50 highest grades of gold observed on surface samples in this area.” AgileDD helped overcome this by extracting and structuring this data, providing the ability for it to be queried and acted upon.

How can AgileDD’s platform improve decision-making processes within mining operations, especially those related to exploration and resource estimation?

AgileDD improves decision-making by enabling mining companies to base their investment decisions on the full set of available data rather than a subset. By extracting and structuring data from historical documents, companies can access everything known to date, ensuring more informed and comprehensive decisions.

For exploration specifically, AgileDD allows companies to create a large dataset of their own geochemistry samples from historical documents before conducting new field work. This makes field trips much more effective by helping geologists better select the areas to sample or revisit based on comprehensive historical data.

What types of mining documents and data (e.g., geological reports, survey results, environmental impact assessments) can AgileDD handle most effectively?

AgileDD effectively handles exploration documents, mining assessment reports, surveys, and engineering documents across multiple formats including PDFs, images, and Microsoft Office documents.

While we’ve primarily worked with exploration documents with companies like Barrick and Quebec, our technology is not limited to these document types. The exploration business particularly benefits from our solutions as geologists frequently need to review previous studies and legacy documents to form a complete picture of the subsurface, which is otherwise opaque and difficult to observe directly.

AgileDD has a “patented approach” to document modeling. Can you explain this in more detail and why it’s significant for mining applications?

AgileDD’s patented approach is the Human in the loop AI solution. The mining industry contains a large volume of documents containing a wealth of information with new documents & information being created daily. Taking those documents and creating actionable information, at scale and with accuracy, can best be accomplished by having a Subject Matter Expert leveraging AI.

How does AgileDD address the issue of data accuracy and validation, especially when dealing with complex and potentially inconsistent mining datasets?

AgileDD addresses data accuracy and validation through two types of AI models:

Generative models: AgileDD allows applying generative prompts at a large scale to capture structured data from large volumes of documents.

Supervised visual and textual models: These capture data at scale and continuously improve from user feedback. While the prompt-based approach doesn’t improve automatically from user feedback, the supervised AI models do learn and improve based on feedback.

This dual approach ensures that data extracted from mining documents is both accurate and trustworthy.

What are the key advantages of AgileDD’s platform compared to alternative solutions for data extraction and analysis in the mining industry?

The key advantage of AgileDD’s platform is achieving both scale and accuracy to create trustable data repositories. We help mining companies process large volumes of documents while maintaining high levels of data accuracy and trust.

Our solution creates a trusted foundation for data-driven decisions, provides conversational access to document knowledge, and extracts precise data from complex tables, including claims, collar data, and assays.

What is AgileDD’s vision for the future of AI-powered document processing in the mining sector?

AgileDD’s vision is to transform enterprise decision-making through human-guided AI that delivers unmatched scale and accuracy in document intelligence. This vision results in tangible results for the mining industry by driving efficiency, reducing exploration cost & risk and improving mining results.

Are there any planned features or functionalities specifically aimed at addressing emerging challenges in the mining industry, such as sustainability reporting or automation?

A key sustainability aspect is that AgileDD helps make field trips more effective by enabling geologists to better select areas to sample or revisit based on comprehensive historical data. Rather than eliminating field work (which geologists value), our technology makes it more targeted and effective.

Another sustainability angle involves critical minerals, which are required for many sustainability initiatives. There is already significant geochemistry information on critical minerals collected over the last 50 years. AgileDD helps mining companies access this historical data before undertaking further exploration, better guiding those decisions and potentially reducing unnecessary environmental impact.

How do you see AgileDD contributing to the overall digital transformation efforts within mining companies?

AgileDD contributes to digital transformation in mining as a leader with dual expertise in both the mining sector and data science. This unique combination positions us to understand the specific challenges mining companies face in their digital journey.

We’re seeing two distinct approaches to digital transformation in the industry. Some companies are testing the waters by processing smaller document sets to evaluate ROI before scaling up.

Others are taking a more aggressive approach – and in just weeks of implementation are uploading hundreds of thousands of documents and developing models with immediate business expert involvement.

The key value we bring to digital transformation efforts is enabling mining companies to efficiently digitize their vast document repositories with accuracy at scale in a cost-effective manner. Many companies know they need to digitize their documents but struggle with how to accomplish this efficiently. We provide a practical path forward that overcomes the apprehension, fear, and cost concerns that have previously hindered these initiatives.

The above references an opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a licensed professional for investment advice. The author is not an insider or shareholder of any of the companies mentioned above.

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