Ensuring mining benefits from the latest software developments

HCLSoftware, the software division of HCLTech, is a global force providing software solutions in 60 countries to over 20 000 organisations, which include more than half of the Fortune 1000. Africa is one of its strategic focus areas due to its high growth and its potential for innovation and economic resilience.

Mining Business Africa recently sat down with Rajiv Shesh, HCLSoftware’s Chief Revenue Officer, to find out what HCLSoftware is doing for the mining sector and going forward how it  plans to provide to the ever-changing software needs of the industry.

MBA: What software solutions does HCLSoftware provide to the mining sector?

RS: The mining sector makes use of a range of equipment for its operations. One of the largest equipment suppliers to mining companies uses our e-commerce platform, HCL Commerce+, for the sale of aftermarket equipment and services.

A robust platform is essential for such business-to-business commerce. This means that HCL Commerce+ must be available 24/7, it must be secure and it must be reliable. The capabilities of the platform must ensure that transactions are initiated, tracked and completed successfully. Search capabilities must also be of the highest quality.

Our platform also provides a virtual marketplace , wherein people providing products and services can announce themselves, can meet and come together.

MBA: Where else do you see HCLSoftware supporting mines?

RS: A phenomenon occurring in my many sectors, including mining, is softwarisation. More and more equipment has more and more software in them. The maintenance of said equipment can now be done remotely because the functionality of the equipment is being provided through software.

The moment you move into a digital asset, it becomes very important to make sure that you are at the right level of patching, which is the right version of software that is in the equipment and is compliant with the guidelines and standards that have been stipulated. All those capabilities we offer through our operations technology, our HCL Commerce+ platform.

With softwarisation comes our ability to capture data. Once we capture data, we make

sure how relevant that data is to be able to come up with inferences, which we then apply to large or small language models for making use of artificial intelligence – another area in which we can contribute to the mining industry in a big way.

We are also investing in better data management, which enables better management of data lineage and the establishment of data contracts. As mining companies adopt more artificial intelligence techniques our relevance in terms of helping them manage their traditional data, which has been there for a long time, will become very meaningful.

We are able to support mining in all aspects, whether it is maintaining uptime of equipment, making sure that their data analytics allow them to come up with right inferences, being able to predict and come to inferences in terms of their operational support.

MBA: What strategies is HCLSoftware deploying to gain mining business?

RS: We will approach the mining industry from three specific areas:

• Cybersecurity
• Observability
• Agentic Technology and AI

MBA: What is observability?

RS: When you have a workflow, you expect an outcome from that workflow. What you want to do is to make sure that your work is going as per the workflow and that the workflow is going quickly. Or are there certain external factors that are creating choke points in that workflow? You’re observing that business workflow to make sure that it is running efficiently.

We believe that in the mining industry that would be of great relevance to make sure that the maintenance of equipment is done correctly. So there are no bottlenecks in that process. And to make sure all the security precautions were taken before any activity is performed. All of those are business workflows in which you would need an element of observability to make sure you know how your operation is going – getting some statistical insights. For example, your tolerance in terms of deviation from your stated process may be less than half a percent. How would you know it is that? You have to observe the process.

That is where we have solutions that come from regulated industries. AI is an industry that will be untasked. The mining industry actually uses software technology packages from all kinds of sources. We believe that these organisations will have agentic technology from all sources; there would be need for the orchestration of this agentic technology.

MBA: Please explain what Agentic Technology entails.

RS: Think of Agentic Tech as agents of action. Imagine a workflow. Let us say, one of getting approval to start mining in a particular area. An agency will be engaged to determine that the area where you want to mine is secure. Another agency will be engaged to determine whether you can mine in that area in an environmentally sound way. Data analysis must take place before any recommendations are made. This work is currently being done by people.

Now, with AI, if you’re capturing environmental data, you can actually run that data through a large language model and then ask a question, is it safe? You will get a report on whether it is safe or not. That work can be packaged into an agent, software agent, and an AI agent to perform that work.

As more and more data comes in, if you start then giving it feedback in terms of this was the inference and this was the outcome, you start getting into what is known as regenerative learning, which is an AI technique. The moment you do this you actually make your agent more learned and more intelligent. One of the characteristics of an AI agent would be that it should have learning ability. You put that together and now you’ve got work being performed by an AI agent which is continuously learning.

This means the existing workflow can be redone in a very different way – using AI – which can deliver tremendous amount of operational efficiency and cost savings, amongst others, to the mining industry. Some of it is being worked upon and tried but some of it is going to be evolving. That is where the approach that we have towards this will be extremely useful. You would look at it from this angle which is observability. Agentic AI technologies dealing with multiple AI agents that the mining industry will get exposed to, to help them orchestrate it.