What have been the main milestones and developments for Strayos in the past year? 

We have been focused on process optimization and have invested in not only expanding our data set, but also building a newer generation advanced AI models for optimization at the drill and blast site through to the mill, which then leads to increased recovery, grade quality, and operational efficiency for customers. With our new generation advanced AI models, we aim to start talking to the equipment, help customers predict what is going to occur, and adjust parameters to get desired outcomes instantly. It has already been proven that AI works, and now we are focusing on the future in terms of what AI can predict. 

Most of the mines are moving towards full autonomy, and the software that generates the information needs to talk to the machines. 
Finally, we have deployed autonomous drones that feed data directly into our platform, allowing AI models to create digital twins that monitor mine conditions, haul roads, and wall stability, especially effective where fully autonomous operations are becoming the norm. For example, if a self-driving vehicle detects a rock spillage, it stops—but lacks the ability to trigger cleanup. With Strayos, the AI identifies the hazard and automatically alerts dispatch to take action. Enabling seamless communication between data, dispatch, and machines has become a critical focus for us as mines move toward full autonomy.

What return on investment can customers expect with Strayos’ solutions?  

In our experience, customers usually want to optimize in terms of efficiency and profitability. This starts at the blasting stage, where the focus is on designing blast patterns that allow for optimal fragmentation and separating the ore from the waste from the beginning so that your equipment can easily locate ore post-blast for targeted loading. In this way, customers can improve their grade and ultimately their yield, as they are processing less waste. 

What would you say to the smaller mining companies about integrating AI? 

The price of technological advancements is coming down rapidly, and you do not have to be a major company to implement technologies that can increase efficiency, safety, and sustainability. 

Strayos has several mid-tier mining customers, and they are actually quite fluent adaptors once they know the direction in which they want to go, as they have much less departments to go through compared to major companies, making the implementation process much faster. The key for technology adoption among mid-tier and smaller companies is to have a true proof of concept. 

What are the benefits of AI besides the obvious use cases? 

There is currently a major skills gap in the mining industry. For instance, the US only produces 500 mining engineers per year, which is an extremely low number. The younger generation is much more willing to embrace technology and tool sets like AI, but we are rapidly losing the older generation who have gained real experience working in mines and who have seen real scenarios. The wisdom of the older generation workforce has to be transferred to the newer generation workforce, and here AI can play a significant role. With AI tools, training and knowledge resources can be captured in one place, and you can build a profile of use cases through experienced mining engineers, geologists, etc., transferring their knowledge into a database. If organizations start to transfer knowledge and information into a database, they will see a huge uplift when the younger workforce comes in and can utilize the company’s own dedicated AI model to gain critical knowledge about the history of the mine and its operations over the years. 

What is Strayos’ value proposition to the market?

Over our 10 years of existence, the company has built a huge source of domain intelligence. We have gained core knowledge on how to apply intelligence at different phases - taking the data and then adding another layer of intelligence, apart from the AI algorithms that we have. We call this data enrichment, and we have seen our customers gain great value from this. Our focus today is on providing that enrichment layer to our AI tools.