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A copper miner develops a recipe for success along its AI transformation journey.
Freeport-McMoRan (Freeport) has a reputation as a savvy operator in the mining industry. The company operates a fleet of relatively mature, large-scale copper mines in the Americas. Its performance is tightly connected to global copper prices: in a high-price environment, the mines generate significant cash, but at the bottom of the price cycle, some mines struggle to break even. The company’s expectations for growth required significant capital and lengthy permitting and construction efforts. Seeking another path, Freeport turned to AI to see if it was possible to get more out of its existing assets.
Over a five-year AI journey, the company successfully designed and executed what it called the “Americas’ Concentrator” program, aiming to unlock the equivalent of an entire new processing facility’s worth of incremental annual copper production through the use of big data, AI, and agile working methods. No new capital deployment was required.
Such an ambitious program required full-fledged commitment from the leadership team. The head of Freeport North American operations was convinced that the company would need to evolve to survive and thrive and wanted to learn from cutting-edge practices used in other industries. This “continuous improvement” leader drove the team to be as ambitious as possible. The chief information and innovation officer had the foresight to establish a common data infrastructure and architecture to support all processing operations, as well as to enable swift deployment of AI tools across sites with modest tailoring. This allowed much of the site-level focus to be on agile practices, training, capability building, and change management. And the CEO and CFO championed the program to external audiences, energizing and buoying the team as it pushed forward with the effort.
To get started, Freeport selected a mature mine, with an enthusiastic and entrepreneurial general manager, as its test case for the AI transformation program. By demonstrating the value of AI in Bagdad, Arizona, the company sought to learn how machine learning (ML)/AI could enhance its existing systems.
Over the course of about six...