Article by Charlie Peel courtesy of the Australian Business Review.
Equipment improvements and innovative techniques have long been the focus for mining companies looking to gain an efficiency edge, but now they have turned to artificial intelligence to boost productivity.
West Australian mining company Roy Hill has developed its own internal chatbot to give its employees better insights about the company’s functions and to increase their personal productivity.
Launched in March, the RoyBot leverages technology from OpenAI’s GPT and other open source programs but is operated in a secure, internal environment.
It can access the company’s data to help give employees insights by interpreting requests and returning accurate, relevant information.
The program was developed after executive chairman Gina Rinehart put out a challenge 18 months ago for the leaders of WA mining companies to use AI to help increase productivity.
“The system is designed to respond to a broad spectrum of inquiries related to production data, company policies and procedures, as well as general HR information,” Roy Hill said in a statement. “Roy Hill’s employees interact with RoyBot using natural language, asking questions through the internal web application.”
The main feature of the program is to provide simplified answers and clear communication while providing company-specific context.
Uses include writing job descriptions for advertisements and helping to identify possible recruits from within the company.
Roy Hill’s executive general manager of technology, Kate Flanagan, said the development of RoyBot aligned with the company’s effort to have the timely and accurate information at employees’ fingertips, facilitating more informed decision making.
“AI has incredible potential in all industries, including mining, and we are fortunate that through the leadership and encouragement of our executive chairman, Mrs Gina Rinehart, we are consistently pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this space,” Ms Flanagan said.
The AI system is adaptable and constantly learning based on previous requests.
“Despite having only been released in March 2023, RoyBot is already proving popular, with approximately 30 per cent of Roy Hill’s workforce using the chatbot on a regular basis,” the company said.
