AI for mining operations,
built in Queensland.
Most mining operators don’t have a software problem. They have an admin problem. The Deswik or Pitram stack handles the mine. But contractor onboarding, compliance reporting, daily site comms and safety doc updates still eat hours every day. That’s the gap we build into.
Your mine planning software is doing its job. The admin around it isn’t.
Walk into a mid-size Queensland mining operation and you’ll find a familiar pattern. The core operating systems (fleet management, scheduling, geological modelling) are sorted. People have spent years and serious money getting those right.
What’s not sorted is the layer around them. Contractor induction records are spread across shared drives, HR systems, and email threads that weren’t designed to talk to each other. Compliance evidence is captured day-to-day in whichever system happens to be in front of the person doing the work. The site senior executive’s statutory obligations are mapped to controlled procedures the first time through, but keeping that mapping current as legislation and recognised standards evolve is a separate, manual job that lives outside any of the core systems. And site supervisors lose an hour or two a day to comms: chasing acknowledgements, forwarding pre-starts, re-typing the same information into three different systems.
None of this shows up in your ERP. It shows up in people’s time, in audit risk, and in the quiet weight of knowing a regulatory amendment may have landed this week that hasn’t yet been fully traced through to the documents on site.
Good. Keep using them. Those systems weren’t built to read a Coal Mining Safety and Health Act amendment, write a plain-English summary, and check it against every controlled procedure on your site. That’s not what they’re for.
The work we do sits on top of what’s already there, automating the admin and compliance layer that your existing mine software doesn’t reach into.
What AI in mining actually means (it’s not robots).
There’s a lot of noise about AI in mining: autonomous haul trucks, drone swarms, neural networks predicting ore grade. That’s real, and that’s BHP and Rio Tinto, not a mid-size operator with a $20M turnover.
What we build is more boring and more useful. AI that reads your documents, checks them against your obligations, drafts your reports, answers your contractors’ questions at 9pm, and keeps a running record of what changed when. It runs in the background, on your existing infrastructure, with a real person (not a chatbot) accountable for getting it right.
In practical terms, that means three things: contractor management automation, compliance reporting automation, and site comms and safety documentation. Here’s what each one looks like.
Three layers we build into for mining operators.
Each one usually starts as a $3,500–$8,000 proof of concept. If it works, it scales into a production build. If it doesn’t, you’ve learned something cheap.
Inductions, ticket and licence checks, insurance currency, site-specific competency records. All of it tracked, expiring tickets flagged, contractors emailed before they turn up to gate.
- Auto-read uploaded tickets, licences and certificates
- Expiry alerts before site arrival, not after
- One source of truth across multiple sites and crews
- Audit-ready records on demand
Legislative change monitoring, automated gap checks against your SHMS, principal hazard management plan updates flagged, and audit packs assembled when an inspector calls.
- Daily check against Coal Mining Safety & Health Act updates
- Plain-English summary of every change that affects you
- Cross-checked against your controlled procedures
- Evidence trail kept current automatically
Pre-start meeting summaries, SWMS drafts, daily site reports, and acknowledgement chasing, all generated from voice notes, photos, or short prompts, then routed to the right people.
- Voice-to-report from supervisors in the field
- Auto-drafted SWMS and JHA documents from existing templates
- Acknowledgement tracking without manual chasing
- Searchable archive of what was communicated, when, to whom
Not sure which layer is the right starting point for your site? A 30-min chat usually sorts that in one conversation.
Talk to Andy →A current build: compliance automation for a QLD surface coal operator.
One of our current mining projects is a compliance engine for a mid-size Queensland surface coal operator. Their compliance team was spending most of a senior staffer’s week reconciling controlled procedures against a register of 1,400+ statutory obligations drawn from the Coal Mining Safety and Health Act, its Regulation, and the recognised standards that sit underneath them.
Every legislative amendment, every recognised standard update, every internal procedure change introduced a small risk: had every relevant control been updated? Could they prove it? Audit prep alone was costing days.
1,400+ obligations, audited automatically, every single day.
An AI compliance engine that reads new legislative amendments and recognised standard updates as they’re published, summarises what’s changed in plain English, and checks every obligation against the site’s current controlled procedures. The compliance team sees a daily dashboard with flagged gaps and prioritised actions, instead of finding them at audit.
Got a similar compliance load you’d like a second pair of eyes on? Bring it to a 30-min call.
Book a chat →We’re a few hours from most QLD mining operations.
AI Answers is based on the Sunshine Coast. Andy can be on a Bowen Basin site, a Surat coal seam gas operation, or a Mount Isa mineral processing plant the same week you call. We work with operators across Queensland, and remotely with clients elsewhere in Australia.
That matters because mining compliance is jurisdictional. Coal in Queensland is regulated under different instruments to coal in NSW. Metalliferous in Queensland is a different framework again. We know which obligations apply, which recognised standards underpin them, and what an inspector is actually going to look at. That’s not a generic AI consulting capability. It’s something we’ve built deliberately, working with Queensland operators.
If you’d prefer to meet in person, that’s the default. Andy is happy to come to you. More about our work across Queensland →
Common questions from mining operators
Compliance keeping you up at night?
Let’s have a chat.
30 minutes with Andy. No pitch deck, no demo loop. Bring one operational headache and leave with a clear view of whether AI is the right answer.