Stephen Scheeler is one of Australia’s top voices on technology, leadership and transformation. Former Facebook ANZ CEO and now CEO of AI startup Omniscient, he shares insights on how mining companies can make the most of artificial intelligence, and surprisingly for an industry where big is best, when it comes to AI it’s the small details that count.
Stephen has called Australia home for more than two decades and has made a name for himself as Australia’s most authoritative voice on AI, but as boy growing up in New York technology was not even on his radar.
“I was not interested in technology as a kid at all. I was into music, literature, history and the humanities. When I went to university I studied classical music,” shared Stephen.
When he came out of university Stephen had no idea what he wanted to do. So he went travelling.
“I traveled for years. I was the classic backpacker, make money, spend money. I did that for almost ten years, traveling around the world and I eventually wound up in Australia. When I was 29, I decided that I needed to finalise my education and get a real job.
“I got an MBA and that was what first drew me into the world of business. In those days MBA’s were about marketing, people and organisational behavior and very little about technology.”
Stephen worked as a management consultant which exposed him to different businesses and he was on the front line as new technologies began to reshape the business world, such as the internet, Bluetooth, RFID and social media.
“All these new things were happening in technology and I was starting to become really interested in how these could be applied in the businesses I was involved in.
“What I became most interested in was how technology changes and how you can create a business around it. How you can change the value for the customer and create a new experience for the consumer using technology.
“Around that time, Facebook approached me to work for them and that was where I learned a lot about how to take risks, how to think about technology, and how to manage third and fourth order effects. I’m not a coder, I don’t have a degree in science or mathematics, but I’ve been successful in the world of technology and I believe that is because the thing that I focus on is people and human interaction is overlaid onto all technology.”
Stephen said that AI has the capacity to be a hugely powerful tool in the hands of companies and that includes mining companies.
“The mining industry has unique characteristics, firstly, its long-term investment cycles. You have to make long-term decisions about what you do and where you are going to invest capital. It is a big ecosystem and all parts of it must work to be efficient and effective and make money.
“Then you have the nature of end markets that you are selling into, some of those end markets and the geopolitics are changing very quickly, probably faster than you are making your investment decisions which can be quite disruptive. There is also a continuous move towards higher regulation and environmental standards which many companies have limited control over.
“So you have long-term investment horizons, big dollar investments and a fair amount of uncertainty in the future. How will the advent of AI start to affect those things? Well it has the power to affect the entire mining ecosystem.”
From extraction to processing to shipping, AI has the potential to influence every stage of the mining value chain, providing cost savings, enhanced safety and improved efficiency and sustainability, but Stephen said that to maximise the benefits you need data.
“That is the big question companies need to be asking themselves. What data do we have, what data do we need, and how are we organising it?
“I believe the question isn’t which AI tools we should be using, but how organised is our proprietary data and how can we mine that with AI in a way that gives us a competitive advantage.
“There is so much minute data in the world that is not on the internet, so basically it doesn’t exist. What pillow do you sleep on? What sauce does your child like on their chips? The answers are not on the internet, only you know. While these seem like random examples, when you pepper those random examples through an entire organisation and then you bring in your AI it is going to make mistakes.
“That is why I tell every company that the most important thing is getting your data organised because AI is only as powerful as the data it has access to.
“You need to have a representative data set which means quantity. It also needs to be quality. Is it accurate? Does it have provenance? Is it true? Then you need to label your data as it cannot be given to an AI in a raw form. It must be cleaned up and have the right identifiers on it, and that takes a lot of humans to do – often expert humans.
“You also need to consider that the data you collect is only going to be as good as the sensing technology that you have. There is a whole world of sensor technology now that is next level, cheaper, lighter and with lower power consumption, but many companies are still using outdated sensors.
“For mining operations, much of their data is ambient data, what’s happening in the mine, what’s happening underground, what’s happening in surveys, and because it is a very physical process of extracting and processing a raw material the sensing part of that is going to be critical to how successful the AI part is.
“All these things come together – having the right sensing technology in the right places at the right time so you can collect the right data.”
Stephen said that eventually everyone will be using the same technology so companies need to look inward.
“If everyone is competing with the same AI and the same data, what is your competitive advantage? It is going to be the unique insight you can derive from your own data. Look at what matters in your business and think about how AI can be used to get to what matters faster, cheaper or create more value. Every company has things that matter. Some of them are common, like controlling costs. It could be innovating quickly or it could be creating safe working environments, it could be regulatory. How can AI help us do that?
“Then you need to be able to move faster, iterate faster, learn faster. There is a big reckoning coming for a lot of companies about how slowly they do things and in the age of AI not being able to move quickly will be fatal.
“It comes down to asking the right questions, assembling the right people, and then giving them the right tools, direction and motivation. Making sure you have a vision to where you want to go and then making decisions and learning fast. When things don’t work out, you learn and move on. The fear of failing is one of the things that really holds back progress but failing is an opportunity to learn.”
Stephen pointed out that AI is only the latest in a long line of technologies that irrevocably changed society and every new technology has had positive and negative impacts.
“The motor car created all kinds of prosperity and new products and wealth but it also created pollution. We don’t really know what the impact of AI will be but we do know that it will be disruptive.
“Take enterprise software, it’s been around now for about thirty years and it’s the big kahuna. We use software every single day to do everything. Suddenly we have this new super smart substitute software that seems to have superpowers. It allows us to do things we couldn’t do before. I think that is why it feels very disruptive, because it is hitting the coalface of how all of us work and live and exist every single day.”
When it comes to AI the genie is out of the bottle and while we don’t know what the future will hold, Stephen for one is embracing it.
“I was a kid from New York who had no interest in technology and now I run an AI business that is on the cutting edge of neuroscience. If I can do it, you can do it too.”
