Andritz was one of three finalists selected to pitch innovative ideas to a panel of high-profile judges at the glitzy live event held to coincide with the annual Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention in Toronto.

The company, which has an automation group in Vancouver, showed how it could use a digital plant twin to "train" AI in its operation before capturing benefits of AI in optimisation scenarios.

"The trained AI's ability to quickly process information and recommend data-driven solutions will allow for the improvement of the operation, such as start-up and shutdown, and assist operators to achieve plant-wide optimisation," said Goldcorp, which offers the winner a platform to negotiate technology implementations and possible contracts.

Goldcorp CEO David Garofalo said the Andritz platform provided the exact kind of "breakthrough thinking" the contest aspired to incubate.

"For the mining industry to reach the demands and potential of the 21st century, every company must step up and innovate. We must all be safer, more efficient, and responsible and we'll get results faster through collaboration and the kind of break-through thinking the #DisruptMining platform is meant to uncover for our industry."

Andritz competed against Anaconda Mining, which has developed a two-stage drilling method to enable economic mining of narrow-vein deposits, and Voith Turbo, a division of Voith GmbH & Co KGaA, whose ‘Internet of Things' application, BeltGenius, creates a digital twin of belt conveyors to provide real-time insight into operational behaviour.