Published on the 08/10/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

And moving beyond the IT budget…

Ask Dan Evan’s what emerging technologies, outside AI, he believes will have the most disruptive impact on Rio Tinto, and his answer may surprise.

It’s quantum and connectivity.

“You can’t scale digital from the centre.”

The Rio Tinto CIO admits his views on quantum have changed somewhat in the last two years ago. Two years ago he believed it wouldn’t have any place in the global mining giant’s business within the next five years. Today, he says it has ‘real potential’ for the mining sector and many other sectors as well.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say we’re in the business of quantum computing yet. There are things like quantum sensors that are actually quite interesting and becoming more available.”

It’s the application of quantum for complex modelling, and cutting modelling that could take hours or even days down to minutes, that particularly interests him.

And while connectivity is something we mainly take for granted nowadays, for Evans and Rio Tinto, it’s still front of mind.

“Across our business we are in some of the most far-flung places on earth and the accessibility of connectivity and communications is key. There are countries that have no access to cloud services today and we are looking at things like cloud edge in many locations to service and support what we want to do with data.”

Technology and digital is a key part of the 150+ year old business – it’s stated ambition is to be the best operator by leveraging technology to enhance safety and efficiency and reduce costs.

“Digital for us, is one of those better ways of running our business,” Evans says.

He says the company has done a lot of work around value stream mapping – the lean-management method of analysing current state and designing a ‘future state’ – to ensure it knows from pit to port what good looks like ‘and what our full potential looks like as a business’.

“Then digital is just an overlay on that as to how we can leverage data and technology to drive the best business outcome.”

Growth mindsets, growth business

Evans says it all starts with mindset.

The company has been running a program called Safe Production Systems (SPS). While it sounds technical and systematic, it started with people and culture, and growth mindsets.

“In Rio we’ve really invested in that growth mindset, and not purely for the purposes of digital. It’s all deeply connected. There’s that realisation that you can’t be the best operator unless you have an open mind, unless you are looking at opportunities around innovation, what you can do with data and tech. So our digital ambition in that context is to really embed data and technology across our value chain.”

The company has been working on ensuring it improves data quality within the organisation with ‘a huge program of work’ focused on uplifting asset management data.

“In other areas we’ve looked at building consistent ontologies [that] create opportunities to leverage data in a way that we’re able to do value stream mapping and increase the speed and reliability with which we do that.

It has invested heavily in its Mine Automation System (MAS) for data integration and AI-driven decision-making. Evans says it sits across 98 percent of the company’s operations and pulls data and applies algorithms, help people manage ‘anything from all body knowledge through to dispatch, drill and blast and provides insights the operators normally wouldn’t have in their day-to-day.”

Not all of the assets, and the asset-based data, is Rio Tinto’s. Evans notes that the company has a rich tapestry of partners who provide their technology, much of which has inbuilt sensors.

“Recently I visited one of our operations where we’ve introduced our own IT sensors onto our equipment to do things like measuring vibrations and heat so we can do better predictive asset maintenance.

“It’s a combination of leveraging our partners to the extent we are able to integrate those data sets we do.”

Other technologies are closed loop and Rio Tinto is looking at how it can augment those solutions with its own sensors to enable it to do better monitoring and control.

Evans says prioritisation and management of investment decisions to balance investing in innovation and investing in operational efficiency – sustaining the core versus investing in the new – is a very structured process.

“The concept of sustaining capital is very core and within the last few years we’ve adapted and adopted that to IT, making sure we are investing in sustaining our digital core.

But when it comes to looking at digital investments, it’s really no different from looking at any investment we make in business… but increasingly it’s not about looking at the IT budget or the digital budgets in isolation. It’s about looking at the budget end-to-end within the organisation and asking if it’s better to buy another truck or actually put in place a digital solution that makes us run the trucks cheaper maybe.”

It’s those opportunities that are at the forefront of how the company makes decisions, he says.

Reciting an oft heard mantra, he adds: “It’s really around actually taking a business-centric view of this and being business led, rather than being technology led.”

With that in mind the company has harnessed business partners – someone within the IT team who is deeply embedded within the business – for a number of years.

“Their role is to be an advocate for IT and an advocate for the business in equal measure.”

They’re roles which Evans says have proven very effective – quite critical in fact – in closing the gap between business and IT strategy.

“In many cases they’ve actually helped our business units or assets to design and build their digital strategies that solve for their business problems.”

But the company also uses centres of excellence or global process owners sitting across multiple businesses.

“It’s a combination of looking for opportunities to replicate and reuse technology where it makes sense to do so, but also recognising there is uniqueness in some of our operations and assets and there are problems we might only need to solve in one part of the business.”

Lessons learned

Evans admits that when Rio Tinto kicked off efforts a few years ago to be more digital, it was focused on building technical skills, building a centre of excellence with capability in software engineering and data, and things like product management, and adopting more agile.

“There was so much focus on building our own capability, proving we were everything we needed to be. But actually, we saw that the most successful products were those where there was a high degree of ownership from our partners in the business – that they actually understood what it meant to be a product owner and that they were committed to giving a lot of time to that.”

“So [my advice would be] don’t be so inward focused on making sure you’ve got your ducks in order. Really invest as much time in supporting your business colleagues to go on that journey with you,” he says.

“We can’t do it all ourselves. You can’t scale digital from the centre.”