Industrial AI gets a test at Caterpillar

That construction site is producing a new building—and tons of data for analysis.

Caterpillar machines are sending information from jobsites to the company’s tech team, which can be used to not only provide insights into how equipment is operating, but also ways to improve the products. Jaime Mineart, Caterpillar’s CTO, told IT Brew at the Ai4 conference this month in Las Vegas that this high-volume collection of sensor and machine data integrates with AI systems embedded on the machines.

“We’ve got 1.6 million connected assets; we have over 16 petabytes of data in a very high-quality, highly structured way,” Mineart said. “When you combine that data with the intelligence that we have on our machines and the understanding of how machines wear, how machines operate, we can serve up a lot more valuable insights and recommendations for our customers.”

Customers have control over the amount of data intake Caterpillar does, Mineart said, though there is some that is collected automatically. The information is anonymized. Construction equipment generates a large amount of data—especially with the autonomous machinery that the company is developing to help with difficult and dangerous industries like remote mining, which Caterpillar introduced in January.

That’s opening the door to innovations on safety and environmental impacts, as well as other uses. “We also have a whole digital ecosystem that allows [customers] to see potential safety incidents and productivity issues that they’ve had on their site that manage their fleet from an equipment management point of view,” Mineart told IT Brew.

Down the line. AI does more than impact operations—it has boosted earnings. In an August 4 earnings call, the company reported $20.5 billion in sales and revenue for the second quarter, a 24% year over year increase, mainly from the company’s role in data center buildouts. But some observers have noted the potential political pushback that could impact the bottom line in the future. “Should we observe deterioration in hyperscalers’ fundamentals—particularly cash flow generation or debt burden—multiples could face a meaningful pullback,” Sergey Glinyanov, a Freedom Broker senior analyst, told Fortune on July 2.

With that much information out there—even anonymized—it’s important to keep an eye on security. On July 20, ransomware group CoinbaseCartel claimed they had breached Caterpillar, warning of a “full dump” of sensitive data if the company did not enter negotiations with them.

When IT Brew reached out for clarification on the breach, Caterpillar Corporate Communications Specialist Lisa Miller shared in an email: “We have no comment regarding claims of this nature.”

Those challenges come with the territory. Mineart is one of three executives with security oversight—she’s CTO; the company also has a CIO and CDO.

“The three of us work in concert with all of our data management and data governance to make sure that we protect that data,” Mineart said. “I talk a lot about [the] safety of the machine and the machine infrastructure, the cybersecurity, the data management, and data governance—all of those things are really, really critical for us.”