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Caterpillar brings autonomous-mining lessons to broader AI push

Caterpillar is applying lessons from autonomous mining to broader AI tools, with its CTO detailing a technician assistant, $100 million in workforce training and record revenue driven by data-center power demand.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-31 00:50

Jaime Mineart, Caterpillar's chief technology officer, described the strategy to TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas earlier this month. The company's move into autonomous equipment began in mining, where labor shortages and hazardous conditions made automation attractive. Caterpillar now sells automated haul trucks, drilling rigs, underground loaders, dozers and remote-controlled construction equipment, and offers a software command center, fleet management and remote terrain intelligence as part of its autonomous toolkit.

"Now we're in this super exciting time where we can take all of that learning from mining and bring it into much more dynamic environments, jobsites, quarries, and construction sites," Mineart said.

One product applying that experience is the Cat AI Assistant. It lets field technicians standing next to a machine use voice commands to retrieve repair procedures, troubleshoot problems and identify parts before beginning a repair. Mineart said the tool is now being used by customers, operators and technicians. The assistant uses Caterpillar's proprietary data, which comes from roughly 1.6 million connected assets worldwide and more than 16 petabytes of structured data, she said.

Caterpillar is also deploying AI to scan jobsites and generate digital twins in manufacturing for analysis, and across enterprise operations. In software development, Mineart said, "We use AI agents to modernize legacy code, generate and test new software, and identify defects earlier."

Mineart said building the technology is only part of the challenge, because deploying an autonomous machine is not the same as transforming a customer site to use AI. "The hard part about autonomy and about physical AI is incorporating that technology into the customer jobsite and into the workflows," she said. The company relies on experienced operators to help train AI systems, drawing on decades of institutional knowledge. As machines become more autonomous, some operators may shift from running a single machine to overseeing several from a remote command center.

That transition has created a new need: training Caterpillar's 118,000 employees. The company plans to spend $100 million over the next five years on workforce training in AI, autonomy and robotics, Mineart said.

The AI infrastructure boom is already affecting Caterpillar's results. Quarterly revenue reached an all-time high of $20.5 billion in the second quarter, helped by strong demand for power-generation equipment used in data centers. Caterpillar's power-generation division posted a 72% sales increase to $3.10 billion, and CEO Joe Creed said "no one is slowing down" in demand for cloud computing and generative AI infrastructure.