By John Vandermay, Chief Technology Officer, Seequent
In the age of AI, the mantra ‘it’s all about the data’ has never been more influential. With agentic AI taking centre stage, the need for trusted, open, and high-quality enterprise data has become non-negotiable.
This data is the foundation for the intelligent agents that will redefine our industries. And for industries that depend on understanding the Earth’s subsurface – from mining and energy to civil engineering and environmental consultancies and agencies – the stakes are higher than ever.
Subsurface data is often sparse, expensive to collect, and scattered across legacy formats or trapped in silos across many stakeholders and systems. Traditional collection methods such as drilling boreholes yield high-quality data but are costly, while remote sensing (like using magnetic data to understand what is underground) is easier to collect, but less reliable. Many organisations also have vast archives of historical records, often locked away in PDFs or outdated systems.
Fortunately, a new generation of open platforms, like Seequent Evo, are breaking down these barriers. By unifying and contextualising complex information, we are paving the way for a new era of geo-agentic AI. Extrapolating incomplete or legacy datasets enables AI to reveal insights hidden in the complexities of geoscience data.
The stakes are high
Decisions made on large-scale projects have implications that last for decades.
Source: Seequent
Decisions made in mining or civil engineering, such as the location of a mine or the materials used in a critical infrastructure project, can have consequences that last for decades, if not centuries. Environmental decisions like the protection of freshwater aquifers not only have long term consequences, they have ethical implications as well. Given the stakes, confidence in the data that drives decisions is paramount.
While we will never fully understand subsurface conditions, the more data we have available to us, and the ease by which we can access and analyse the data, the more confident we can be in our recommendations. leading to more confident and reliable recommendations that otherwise would not have been possible.
This not only drives efficiency and cost savings for industries often facing tight margins and high project costs, but it also helps to minimise environmental impact and mitigate risk by reducing the need for invasive methods like drilling.
Automating routine tasks and enabling professionals to interact with complex data through natural language, AI can lower the barrier to entry for new talent and empower experienced experts to focus on higher-value, strategic work, unlocking productivity and helping to overcome the skills shortage. This helps us solve the declining number of highly skilled geoscientist and geotechnical engineers.
Seequent’s approach: AI built for geoscience
At Seequent, we have been mastering the intricacies of geoscience for decades. This deep industry experience gives us a unique perspective on the real-world challenges our customers face. We are bringing tailored AI workflows directly into our applications, so users don’t need to be a data scientist to benefit from advanced analytics.
Chief Executive Officer Graham Grant and Chief Customer Officer Angela Harvey explain how Seequent Evo is redefining how customers can work with their data to drive innovation.
Source: Seequent
Seequent solutions like Seequent Evo and Central bring all your data— from Seequent’s ecosystem and beyond —into one place. Because the more data you have, the more reliable AI models become. Evo, currently available to Seequent’s mining users, is designed as an open platform that can easily egress and ingress data into the platform in highly efficient open format. As a single trusted source for your subsurface data, the Evo platform and API allows customers to build their own solutions, automate workflows with highly-accessible scripting or connect best-in-class tools like Google Vertex directly to their data. Opening up these capabilities across all our domains will enable massive industry transformation at scale.
We recognise that bad data is worse than no data. Metadata, data transformations, computations, history, lineage and geolocation all give context to AI. It is imperative that data lineage is a natural extension of the platform, so customers know how results were generated and the assumptions and decisions that were taken along the way. In mining this could include tracing a sample back to the drillhole it came from, understanding how a lab processed and recorded results, and seeing which version of the data was incorporated into the geological model.
Many Seequent applications integrate AI natively to improve the productivity of geoscientists in the tools they use every day, and we continue to enhance this, where it makes sense. Geoscientists can use AI with confidence because they are in the loop on any final decisions.
Using our solutions with AI, geologists can analyse core imagery to extract richer insights, turning raw images into actionable knowledge.
Evo is open, with public APIs and open-source reference implementations and data schemas, sharing how subsurface data in our solutions is structured, organised, and exchanged. This will allow more innovation by ensuring different systems, tools, and organisations can easily exchange and understand data – including AI models.
The dawn of agentic AI in geoscience
When we think of AI, we often picture productivity tools like predictive text or image recognition. While these are impactful, agentic AI opens new opportunities. Agentic AI systems can make decisions, take actions, and adapt to their environment to meet specific goals.
Consider a drilling campaign in mining. The process requires constant adjustments based on geology, ore grade, equipment performance, and financial targets. This is a complex, multi-faceted analysis that is a prime candidate for agentic AI. Imagine a future where a series of agent could be tasked to orchestrate and optimis a drilling campaign in real-time, weighing various data streams, and presenting the human expert with a set of optimal scenarios. allowing for faster, more informed decisions.
What this means for our customers
Given our deep expertise in geoscience software when combined with the Evo platform we know where and how AI can have the most impact and are embedding those capabilities directly into the tools and workflows you use every day. For organisations with in-house AI talent, our open platform lets them innovate further, building custom solutions on top of Seequent’s robust data infrastructure.
We’re also committed to responsible AI. Your data is always your own, and you will always be able to provide your consent and retain control of your data.
As we move into this new era, the phrase ‘it’s all about the data’ has never been more resonant. With Seequent, you have a partner who not only understands the power of your data but also has the vision and expertise to help you unlock its full potential.