Key Takeaways from the Presentation

It's About Trust, Not Technology

"I'm going to give you the result of my talk right now," Pieter told the audience. "It's all about building trust. It's not about the technology. The technology is the easy part. Building the trust so people actually put it into the plant is the hardest part of this equation."

The Perfect Storm in Industrial Operations

Pieter outlined three converging forces creating unprecedented pressure on industrial operators:

• Growing technical complexity — Systems generate more data and alerts than humans can process. Every new machine comes with a new app, adding to the cognitive load on operators.
• Knowledge exodus — Experienced engineers are retiring faster than they can be replaced. "Our kids don't want to work in mining. They want to work at Google."
• Produce more with less — Resources are deeper, harder to extract, and operations must deliver more output at lower cost.

The Evolution of Decision-Making

The presentation traced the evolution from dashboards to autonomous operations:

1. Decision Support — "Tell me what's happening." Traditional dashboards where humans are the loop.
2. Decision Augmentation — "Tell me what I should do." Copilots and AI assistants support human decisions (2023-2024).
3. Decision Automation — "Do it for me." Multi-agent generative systems that can analyse, reason, and act.

Pieter emphasised that this is a continuum — not everything moves to full automation. "You can have some of your work sit in a dashboard, someone's going to have a copilot, and some of it is going to have agents doing it for you."

Multi-Agent Teams: From 2 Hours to 1 Minute

Using a crusher maintenance team as an example, Pieter demonstrated how a team of AI agents — a monitoring agent, diagnostic agent, planning agent, and optimisation agent — can work together to analyse equipment issues in one minute, compared to the two hours it would take a human engineer to gather and process the same data across multiple dashboards.

"The agents don't know this by magic. We are embedding the engineer's knowledge into those agents. That's where the humans fit in — making these things useful."

Aligning AI with Business Value

Citing Gartner's finding that 70% of AI initiatives fail when there's no clear plan for what agents should do, Pieter outlined the value alignment framework:

• Run more often — Increase asset availability through predictive maintenance
• Produce more when running — Optimise equipment performance
• Extract more — Improve process technology and yield
• Reduce cost — Operational efficiency gains

"Any initiative needs to align with one of these value buckets — where does it fit into the way that you derive value in your organisation."

Real-World Results: Minera Chinalco

Following Pieter's presentation, Alfonso Muñoz, Director of Production at Minera Chinalco, shared remarkable results from their integrated operations centre:

• $15 million in value delivered in the first 2.5 months of operation
• 29,000 additional tonnes of copper produced in the previous year through improvement projects
• 2,000 tonnes of additional copper contributed in February alone from their improvement portfolio
• Anomaly detection system monitoring 220 variables across three mills in real time
• Operational decision-making in real time — tracking material from the moment the shovel loads the truck through to the final processing stage

The Chinalco example demonstrated exactly what Pieter described — technology delivering real results because the organisation invested in the people, culture, and trust required to make it work.

About the CIIT Latam Congress

The CIIT Latam Congress (Congreso de Innovación Tecnológica) is a biennial congress held on March 27-28, 2026 at the Country Club Lima Hotel in Lima, Peru. The event brings together over 400 participants from 15+ countries across mining, energy, and industrial sectors, featuring more than 40 keynote sessions on topics including operational excellence, data connectivity, cybersecurity, and the future of digital talent. The 2026 edition was organised by DEEV and sponsored by Cisco, Las Bambas, and Hudbay.

Learn More

To learn more about how XMPro's Agentic Operations Platform is helping mining and industrial operators build trust in AI-driven decision-making, visit our platform overview or speak to a specialist.