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Vocus is helping mining operators integrate data, connectivity and artificial intelligence to drive smarter decision-making.
As mining operations continue to develop their digital technology infrastructure, the way in which tools like artificial intelligence (AI) are measured to deliver value needs to be more considered.
Speaking to Australian Mining, Vocus head of digital solutions and innovation Greg Phillips pointed to greater oversight.
“We need to lose the buzz of AI a little bit and ask what it actually means and what metrics it is delivering,” he said.
“Is it driving iron ore production out of the ground faster, enabling geographical surveys to be completed more quickly, allowing predictive maintenance to be done differently or reducing man-hours on site?”
As a provider of digital infrastructure, Vocus is supporting conversations on how technology can be better integrated into mining operations to boost outcomes.
“The conversations now are much more about outcomes that are not driven by information technology (IT) teams, but safety and operational items such as productivity gains and reducing risk,” Phillips said.
“We are seeing technology adoption being driven by people who do not necessarily speak the traditional technology language, but who are now involved in decisions around digital transformation.”
That shift is also changing how technology providers work with mining companies and operators.
Rather than presenting a common “off the shelf” solution and asking where it can be implemented, Phillips said Vocus works with customers to identify business outcomes and problems first and then determine how technologies can come together to address them.
“We focus on co-creation with customers, because often we are looking to solve or deliver industry outcomes, and we need to combine our learnings and capability to best deliver. Neither of us know all the answers, but the combined expertise leads to the realisation of greater benefits,” he said.
“They are more knowledgeable than us in their industry, while we speak to a wide range of customers within and across industries, so we try to work towards what is possible, with reduced operational risk.”
Becoming outcome-driven
A focus on measurable outcomes also highlights the limitations created by disconnected data, which Vocus helps fix through its suite of scalable digital infrastructure solutions, already adopted by several mining companies across Western Australia and beyond.
“The industry needs to overcome elements of these individual technology ecosystems that are proprietary and find ways to extract their data into a single pane of glass or a single observability platform,” Phillips said.
The opportunity extends beyond simply bringing data together, with value coming from using information to trigger decisions and actions.
“We are seeing a lot of data being gathered and a lot of data available everywhere. It is about what we do with it. What we should see in the future is AI taking actions defined in a workflow from the digital environmental behaviour it observes,” Phillips said.
Vocus is seeing renewed interest in edge computing as mining companies seek to make decisions using data closer to where it is generated. While many operations have moved data away from mine sites into remote operations centres, Phillips said the increased demand for real-time decision-making is creating a need to process some information closer to the source.
“Where there is more data processing required at the edge for real-time decision-making, we are finding an increased demand for edge graphics processing units (GPUs) or edge processing to support those decisions,” he said.
The infrastructure supporting those systems is therefore becoming as important as the applications themselves. Vocus has launched its Horizon cable, connecting Perth with the north-west coast of Australia, while also working across private 5G networks and low earth orbit satellite connectivity.
Phillips said resilience is becoming a growing consideration as mining companies rely more heavily on connected systems.
“The more decisions that they need to make, the more resilient infrastructure and secure infrastructure they need, as much as they need bandwidth,” he said.
That requirement also extends to cybersecurity, as AI increases the volume of data processed and the potential attack surface around connected operations.
As mining companies continue to pursue productivity gains, lower operational risk and greater resilience, the next phase of digital transformation will depend on how effectively technology, data and infrastructure work together.
For Phillips, that means starting with the operational problem and building the technology around it, rather than the other way around.
This feature appeared in the November 2026 edition of Australian Mining.