Caterpillar is taking what it learned from more than a decade of running autonomous mining trucks and applying it across a company-wide artificial intelligence push, the industrial equipment maker’s chief technology officer told TechCrunch.
“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,” CTO Jaime Mineart said, describing a shift from remote mine pits to construction sites, quarries and Caterpillar’s own internal operations.
From mines to job sites
Caterpillar’s Cat Command autonomous-haulage system has directed self-driving trucks at mine sites for more than a decade. The company is now feeding lessons from that program into broader physical AI work, including a Cat AI Assistant that lets technicians pull up repair procedures with voice commands, plus AI used for digital twins, site scanning, legacy-code modernization and software testing.
The data behind that effort is substantial: Caterpillar says it has 1.6 million connected assets worldwide feeding more than 16 petabytes of structured machine data.
The hard part isn’t the technology
Mineart said the bigger obstacle to scaling autonomy and physical AI isn’t the models or hardware — it’s fitting them into how customers actually work. “The hard part about autonomy and about physical AI is incorporating that technology into the customer jobsite and into the workflows,” he said.
To close that gap, Caterpillar plans to spend $100 million over five years training its roughly 118,000 employees in AI, autonomy and robotics. The workforce challenge Mineart described echoes findings elsewhere — a recent survey of Georgian businesses also identified a shortage of AI skills, rather than the technology itself, as the top barrier to adoption.
Caterpillar’s AI push comes as its underlying business benefits from the broader AI infrastructure boom: the company posted record quarterly revenue of $20.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026, with power-generation sales — many tied to AI data centers — up 72% to $3.1 billion.
That dual role, supplying the power and machinery behind AI data centers while also retooling its own operations around AI, is becoming more common among industrial firms as automation moves from single-purpose mining fleets toward general-purpose robotics and enterprise tools.