Exploration Strategies at Geologic AI will delve into Deeper Data, Better Decisions: Technology and the Future of Mineral Exploration, with an emphasis on big data and AI and its impact on the industry.
Date/Time: Thursday, November 3 | 9:15am
Location: Wellington Room
Canada’s mineral exploration industry stands at a turning point. Demand for the critical minerals that power electrification is surging, yet exploration success rates continue to decline, project timelines keep stretching, and too many new mines underperform against expectations — often because of poor orebody knowledge. At the same time, our industry runs on a boom-bust cycle of hiring and layoffs tied to metal prices, and struggles with a public perception as a dirty, legacy business — making it a hard sell to the next generation of talent Canada will need to responsibly develop its mineral wealth. Big data and AI have arrived in mineral exploration, and the timing could not be more important: after decades of relying on manual observation and subjective judgment to interpret drill core, the industry now has data that is deeper, more consistent, and rich enough to support advanced, data-driven modelling — turning raw geological information into real insight and better decisions. Drawing on three decades working across major miners and technology-driven exploration companies, this talk looks candidly at how that shift — the move to big data, including advanced core scanning, combined with AI-assisted modelling and faster decision-making — is genuinely changing the economics of exploration: better subsurface understanding means fewer wasted drill holes and less disturbed land. It illustrates this with a current, real-world example: an end-to-end technology-driven exploration program at a copper project in Arizona. It also draws on the speaker’s experience teaching and training the next generation of geoscientists: the combination of geology and technology is proving to be a genuinely effective way to attract talented students and young professionals into the field, and may be one of the industry’s best, and most underused, tools for solving its talent problem. This talk’s focus is technical and strategic: what the data and the technology actually deliver today, what’s still hype, and how that same technology can help bring a new generation of geoscientists into the field.
Speakers
Patrick Redmond, President of Resource Exploration Strategies at GeologicAI
Patrick Redmond is President of Resource Exploration Strategies at GeologicAI, where he leads the application of advanced geoscience data, analytics, and decision-engineering technology to reduce discovery risk and accelerate mineral project development. An economic geologist with more than 30 years of international mineral exploration and mining experience, Patrick has a track record of value creation through exploration and discovery across multiple commodities and jurisdictions, in senior exploration and geoscience leadership roles with Teck Resources, KoBold Metals, and Copper Mountain Mining. He completed his PhD research at Stanford University on the Bingham Canyon porphyry Cu-Au-Mo deposit, and his published work on porphyry copper systems remains widely cited in the field. Patrick is a Fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists and holds adjunct professorships at two universities.