Digital Transformation in Gold Mining: 7 Tools and Results

Digital transformation in gold mining means replacing paper, spreadsheets and manual steps with connected data and machines, from the first exploration target to the gold bar that leaves the refinery. It is already running at named mines. Newmont’s Boddington mine in Western Australia operates a fleet of 41 autonomous haulage trucks (Newmont annual report on Form 10-K for 2025). Agnico Eagle says that for the full year 2025 about 22% of the ore hauled to surface at its LaRonde Zone 5 (LZ5) was moved by automated scoops and trucks.

This page walks through seven digital tools in the order a gold project meets them, with a real mine or a standards body behind each one, what each needs and where it falls short. It also covers five operating mines, the risks, a sensible order for a mine owner to start, and two calculators. A few terms first. A g/t is grams of gold per tonne of rock. Dilution is waste rock mixed into ore, which lowers the grade that reaches the plant. AISC (all-in sustaining cost) is the cost of producing one ounce, including the capital needed to keep the mine running, as defined by the World Gold Council. An autonomous truck has no driver on board. An LHD (load-haul-dump machine, or scoop) is the underground loader. None of this is investment advice.

Why gold miners are going digital

Costs are the pressure. The World Gold Council reports that the industry’s average AISC hit a record US$1,785 per ounce in the first quarter of 2026, up 16% on a year earlier, with royalties and corporate overheads behind the rise (the data lags by a quarter). Company reports for 2025 point the same way. Barrick, Newmont and Agnico Eagle all reported a higher full-year AISC than in 2024, although each company defines its metric slightly differently and part of the increase is royalties that rise with the gold price. Agnico Eagle, for example, said royalty costs of about US$42 per ounce pushed it slightly above its guidance.

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US gold mine production slipped from 2021 to 2025

Tonnes of gold; 2025 is a USGS estimate

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All-in sustaining cost per ounce rose at three major producers

US$ per ounce of gold, full year; each company uses its own definition (Agnico Eagle: by-product basis; Newmont: co-product basis; Barrick: gold AISC)

Output is not growing fast either. USGS estimates US gold mine production fell from 187 tonnes in 2021 to 160 tonnes in 2025, while the average price rose from US$1,801 to about US$3,300 per troy ounce. World mine production was an estimated 3,300 tonnes in 2025, almost level with 3,280 tonnes in 2024 (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026). The charts do not prove that digital tools cut costs. They show why owners look for gains that need no new ore: fewer idle trucks, less waste sent to the mill, faster targeting and safer work.

How we chose these seven tools

We kept a tool only if it met three tests. It is described in a company filing, a regulator or industry-body publication, a peer-reviewed paper or the vendor’s own technical page. It is used on gold operations or for gold. And it turns data into a decision, such as where to drill, where to send a load or whether a dam is moving. The list follows the life of a project, from exploration to the refinery. We did not rank the tools by payback, because few gold producers publish comparable payback figures for them. Vendors named here are examples of what a category does, not recommendations. One tool, satellite screening, is a Farmonaut service and is marked Our product.

Seven digital tools for gold mines at a glance

1. Satellite and drone data for targeting

Best for: licence owners and consultants deciding where to walk, sample and drill first.

No satellite sees gold. What it can see is the rock that hot, mineral-rich water leaves around a gold system: iron-oxide staining, clay and mica minerals and faults. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 pair carries 13 spectral bands, 10 m resolution and a 5-day revisit (ESA), which is enough to screen a licence block before field work. Older claims need care: the short-wave infrared bands on NASA’s ASTER instrument have returned unusable data since April 2008. Machine learning then ranks the targets. A peer-reviewed comparison in Ore Geology Reviews tested neural networks, random forest, regression trees and support vector machines for mineral prospectivity (Rodriguez-Galiano and others, 2015).

Drones add detail where it matters: pit walls, stockpiles and access roads. Our guide to GIS drone mapping covers the survey side, and our page on finding gold deposits explains the field methods that follow screening.

Our product: Farmonaut Mining Pro takes a licence boundary as a KML, KMZ or polygon and returns satellite-derived exploration targets in 5 to 20 business days. These are targets that sit ahead of a resource estimate. They do not replace drilling and they do not guarantee a find.

Limits: cloud, soil and vegetation cover hide rock, and every target needs a field check.

▶ Explains that no satellite sees gold itself, but satellites can map the altered rock a gold system leaves behind. · 2:00

2. 3D geological models and mine planning software

Best for: teams that hold drillhole, structure and assay data and need one model to plan from.

Geological models sit under most other decisions: where to drill, how to design the pit and when to mine each block. Seequent describes Leapfrog Geo as implicit modelling software that combines drillhole data, structural data and other geoscience data into 3D models that update as new data arrives. Maptek Vulcan sits in the 3D mine planning, design and scheduling category. A model feeds the resource estimate, the pit or stope design and the schedule, so an error early on repeats in all three.

Limits: software does not create information. A model built on sparse drilling gives smooth, confident-looking shapes that can still be wrong, and any resource figure must follow your reporting code (JORC, NI 43-101 or S-K 1300) and a qualified person.

3. Real-time grade control and ore tracking

Best for: mines where ore and waste are mixed at the face and every truck matters.

▶ Explains the three jobs an AI mining tool can do (find places to look, plan the mine, run it) and the questions to ask who makes one. · 3:52

Grade control decides, bucket by bucket, whether a load goes to the mill or the waste dump. Sensors now do part of that job. MineSense says its ShovelSense system uses high-speed X-ray fluorescence sensors on shovels and loaders to estimate the grade of each bucket and alert the operator to redirect the load to the mill or to waste. The company states the purpose as lower ore loss and less dilution. Treat the benefit as something to prove in a trial on your own ore. Ask any vendor which element the sensor actually measures, and at what grade, on your ore.

The calculator below shows why the question is worth asking. Enter your own feed, grade and dilution to see how many ounces move when dilution changes. All defaults are round examples.

4. Autonomous haulage and fleet management

Best for: large open pits with long, repeatable haul roads and enough fleet to carry the fixed cost.

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Komatsu autonomous ultra-class trucks by model

Trucks commissioned worldwide by April 2026; the split is Komatsu’s percentages (52%, 24%, 24%) applied to 1,000 trucks

Autonomous haulage is the digital tool with the clearest record on gold mines. Boddington runs 41 autonomous trucks in a pit system with a capacity of about 200,000 to 250,000 tonnes of material a day, and Newmont’s 2023 sustaining capital included haul truck purchases for the Boddington autonomous system (Newmont 10-K, 2025). IAMGOLD’s Côté Gold mine in Ontario, a 70/30 partnership with Sumitomo Metal Mining, was planned with an autonomous truck and drill fleet, with Caterpillar 793F trucks running in autonomous mode (IAMGOLD annual information form, February 2026).

Nevada is the newest case. Nevada Gold Mines and Komatsu launched an autonomous haulage partnership on 31 July 2025 to automate NGM’s 300-tonne and 230-tonne surface trucks, supported by a private 5G network from Sedna and Nokia. Barrick’s 2025 annual report records the start of the autonomous haul project at Cortez during 2025, and in April 2026 Komatsu said the 1,000th autonomous ultra-class truck it has commissioned worldwide joined the fleet at Nevada Gold Mines. That milestone is Komatsu’s own count. Barrick’s chief executive said autonomy moves operators away from haulage into more skilled roles.

Fleet management software sits underneath all of this. It assigns trucks to shovels, tracks cycle times and logs fuel and downtime. The second calculator below shows what a small gain in truck availability is worth, using your own fleet size and hourly cost.

Limits: a private network, new safety rules for mixed fleets and a multi-year capital programme. IAMGOLD warns that its autonomous equipment depends on secure, uninterrupted digital infrastructure. For a plant-side view of digital tools, see our page on gold processing and our guide to comminution; this page stays with the mine.

5. Underground automation and remote operation

Best for: underground mines with repeat routes, where moving operators to the surface removes people from the riskiest ground.

Kibali in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the best-known example. In 2021 Barrick’s chief executive said it was the world’s most highly automated underground gold mine, with operators controlling loaders from the surface and machine learning applied at three hydropower stations (MINING.COM, 8 October 2021). Barrick holds 45% of Kibali, AngloGold Ashanti holds 45% and the DRC government 10%, and Barrick’s 2025 annual report shows its share of the mine produced 303,000 ounces that year.

At Agnico Eagle’s LZ5 at LaRonde in Quebec, the company says it achieved its automation targets in 2025, and automated scoops and trucks hauled about 22% of ore to surface, which the company said exceeded its production target of 3,500 tonnes a day (Agnico Eagle, Q4 2025 results). The Kibali claim is the company’s own and dates from 2021, so treat it as a starting point for questions rather than a ranking.

Limits: automation works best where the mine layout was built for it. Retrofitting an older mine means new communications, new traffic rules and retraining.

6. Satellite radar and sensors for tailings and land

Best for: any gold mine with a tailings facility, a waste dump or a lease that must be reclaimed.

Tailings are the waste slurry left after gold is extracted, and a failed dam is the worst outcome a mine can have. The industry standard for managing them is the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management. ICMM reports that, at August 2025, 67% of its members’ 836 facilities were in full conformance and over 80% of the extreme and very high consequence facilities were.

Satellite radar adds a ground-movement layer. Interferometric radar (InSAR) compares radar images over time to measure small ground movement. A study of the No. 4 tailings dam at the Dexing copper mine used 118 Sentinel-1A images from 2018 to 2021 and measured the upper dam moving away from the satellite at 40 mm a year while the lower part moved toward it at 8 mm a year (Sensors, 2023). The dam is at a copper mine, but the method applies to any tailings dam. Optical satellites (Sentinel-2) track bare ground, water and revegetation across a lease in the same way.

Limits: in that study the images came every 12 days, so radar is a trend tool and does not replace ground instruments and daily inspections.

7. Digital chain of custody for gold bars

Best for: producers and refiners that need to prove where gold came from.

A common question is what technology is used to track gold supply chains. The clearest answer is the Gold Bar Integrity programme run by LBMA (the London Bullion Market Association) with the World Gold Council. Launched in March 2022, it set out to register and track bars on a blockchain-backed ledger, with pilots from two distributed-ledger providers, aXedras and Peer Ledger. The pilot involved more than 30 participants across 13 locations and 16 completed test cases. LBMA also said further governance work was needed on a common data taxonomy and dispute handling.

The live system is narrower than the pilot. The Gold Bar Integrity database went live in January 2025, built by aXedras, and LBMA’s 2025 annual report says all Good Delivery refiners are now onboarded and have submitted their responsible-sourcing audit documents. It currently focuses on responsible-sourcing assurance data, including country of origin and high-risk supplier information. LBMA’s 2025 annual report said voluntary periodic reporting of country-of-origin data would start from the end of Q1 2026, with aggregated reporting of London vault holdings through the platform by the end of 2026. In short, refiners now share sourcing data digitally. Tracking each bar from mine to vault is the stated goal, not yet a completed feature.

Limits: a ledger records what is entered. Garbage in at the mine gate stays garbage on the chain, which is why audits and country-of-origin checks still matter.

Five gold mines that went digital

These are the operating cases above in one table. Each entry states the source and whether the claim is the company’s own. For other large gold regions, see our pages on active gold regions in the United States and the world’s biggest gold deposits.

What goes wrong: cost, cyber risk and people

Companies rarely publish what a digital programme costs, so we give no price. Newmont mentions only that its 2023 sustaining capital included haul truck purchases for the Boddington system, and Barrick says higher project capital in 2025 reflected the start of its autonomous haul project. Ask vendors for a quote against your own fleet and your own network.

The bigger lesson in the filings is risk. Newmont says new technology such as AI, fleet electrification and autonomous vehicles may expose its operations and computer systems to the risk of cybersecurity incidents, and in November 2025 it adopted an enterprise-wide AI standard. IAMGOLD lists the same exposure for its autonomous fleet. A connected mine needs strong cyber security: separate networks for machines, patching, and a plan for running by hand if the network drops. Plan the training too. Barrick frames autonomy as a move from driving to supervising, and that only works if the crew is retrained before the trucks arrive.

How a mine owner can start: seven steps

1. Write down the decision you want to improve. Pick one: where to drill, which loads go to the mill, how many trucks are idle, or whether the dam is moving.
2. Check your data. Collar surveys, assays, haul cycle logs and dispatch records often sit in different files. Clean them before buying anything.
3. Screen the licence from space. A satellite pass over the block gives a first screen and tells you where to walk first.
4. Build or update the 3D model. Use it to test where one more hole changes the plan.
5. Run a trial on your own ore. For grade control sensors, insist on a reconciliation against mill results before you scale.
6. Fix the network and security first. Autonomous equipment needs reliable connectivity, as IAMGOLD and the NGM partnership both state.
7. Add traceability last, but plan for it now. Keep audit-ready records of origin from the first ounce, because refiners now report sourcing data to LBMA.

If you hold ground in the United States, our guides to gold deposits in the United States and Texas gold deposits show where to start the screen.

▶ Shows what a mineral management system does: maps, samples and targets in one place instead of many spreadsheets. · 3:21

If this topic matters to you, read Harmony Gold Mining Stock: Tickers, Results, Dividends next.

Related reading on this site: Predictive Analytics in Mining: Use Cases and Results.

Frequently asked questions

What is digital transformation in gold mining?

It is the use of connected data, software and automated machines across the mine: exploration targeting, 3D models, grade control, autonomous trucks, monitoring and traceability. The best-documented results are autonomous haulage, with 41 trucks at Boddington (Newmont 10-K, 2025), and automated underground hauling, about 22% of ore hauled to surface at LZ5 in 2025 (Agnico Eagle).

Which digital technologies are used in gold mines?

The seven covered above: satellite and drone targeting, 3D geological models, real-time grade control, autonomous haulage, underground automation, satellite radar and sensors for tailings, and digital chain of custody. Fleet management software and private 5G networks sit underneath several of them.

What technology is used to track gold supply chains?

The main industry system is the LBMA Gold Bar Integrity database, built by aXedras on distributed-ledger technology and live since January 2025. All Good Delivery refiners are onboarded and submit responsible-sourcing data, including country of origin. Tracking every bar from mine to vault is the programme’s stated aim and is not yet complete.

Are autonomous trucks used in gold mines?

Yes. Newmont’s Boddington runs 41, IAMGOLD’s Côté Gold was planned around an autonomous fleet, and Nevada Gold Mines started an autonomous haul project at Cortez in 2025. Komatsu said in April 2026 that the 1,000th autonomous ultra-class truck it has commissioned joined Nevada Gold Mines.

Can satellites find gold?

No satellite sees gold itself. Satellites map altered rock, iron staining, clay minerals and faults that can point to a gold system. Sentinel-2 offers 13 bands at up to 10 m resolution with a 5-day revisit (ESA). Targets still need field mapping, sampling and drilling.

How much does digital mining technology cost?

Gold producers rarely publish a comparable per-project price. Cost depends on fleet size, network and site. Ask for a quote against your own numbers, and use the calculators on this page to test whether a gain in uptime or a drop in dilution would cover it.

What are the main risks?

Cybersecurity, connectivity and training. Newmont and IAMGOLD both state in their filings that autonomous and connected equipment adds exposure to cyber incidents and depends on secure, uninterrupted digital infrastructure.

What is dilution in gold mining, and why measure it?

Dilution is waste rock mixed with ore during mining. It lowers the grade fed to the plant, so the same tonnes yield fewer ounces. Sensors on shovels, such as MineSense’s ShovelSense, aim to catch waste before it is sent to the mill.

Where should a small gold miner start?

Start with data and one decision. A satellite screen and a clean 3D model are small first steps compared with buying equipment, and a trial of grade control on your own ore can show whether more investment is justified. Follow the seven steps above.

How do satellites help monitor tailings dams?

Satellite radar measures small ground movement over time. A 2023 study at the Dexing copper mine measured dam movement of up to 40 mm a year from 118 Sentinel-1A images. It is a trend check that sits alongside inspections and on-site instruments.

Does automation replace miners?

Companies describe it as a change of role. Barrick says autonomy moves operators away from haulage into more skilled roles, and at Kibali operators control loaders from the surface. The staffing effect at a given site depends on the mine and is not published in a comparable form.

What does Farmonaut offer a gold project?

Farmonaut Mining Pro screens a licence boundary with satellite data and returns exploration targets in 5 to 20 business days. It is a screening step ahead of drilling and a resource estimate, not a replacement for either.