Authored by: Tom Carmichael, Chief Operations Officer, Datarock
TL;DR: Summer 2025’s South Australian mining events revealed a fundamental shift in industry innovation: technology has matured beyond start ups into collaborative workstreams between operators, government, and service providers. The key insight? Operators no longer want more data, they want actionable insights and results. As innovation becomes distributed across partnerships rather than owned internally, the highest value now goes to those who can integrate capabilities and accelerate decision-making, not those who simply provide tools. The bottleneck is no longer technological but organisational, requiring new partnership models and procurement frameworks that share both risk and reward.
The start of summer is a busy time for the South Australian mining industry, with Discovery Day, SAEMC and the Energy Resources Summit – Datarock was well represented at all three of these events, with a booth at Discovery Day and speaking slot on a panel discussing ‘Innovation and emerging technological advancements in the energy resources sector’.
What stood out during the panel was how clearly it demonstrated that much of this technology has ‘grown up’. Innovation in our industry is no longer confined to start-ups or isolated R&D teams, it’s now a shared space where operators, government and service providers are contributing together on workstreams. With representation from Santos (David To), the South Australian Government (Alicia Caruso), Fleet Space (Anthony Reid), EarthDaily (Steve Davis) and Datarock (semi-ably represented by myself), we had the full spectrum of hardware, software, consulting, government and operations sharing their perspectives. .
A recurring theme was the increasingly collaborative nature of modern innovation. The old model of building large internal teams, owning the entire problem end-to-end, and expecting a single team to deliver meaningful change simply isn’t viable anymore. The pace of technological change, the cost of maintaining cutting-edge capability, and critically, the breadth of specialist expertise required, mean that innovation now happens at the intersection between operators and vendors, between government and industry, between domain experts and data specialists.
The other key takeaway was the shift away from Software-as-a-Service or Data-as-a-Service. Operators no longer want more data to look at, they want fewer decisions to struggle over. ‘Insight-as-a-Service’ and, in some cases, ‘Results-as-a-Service’: companies who don’t just deliver data, but deliver meaning and outcomes. Mining doesn’t need real-time systems everywhere; it needs timely ones, capabilities that intervene at the point of highest value. That’s where the most interesting innovation is now happening.
One understated theme was capability uplift, as technology matures, the bottleneck is increasingly organisational rather than technical. Machine learning models don’t just demand better algorithms, they demand tighter partnerships, clearer accountability frameworks, and procurement models that recognise shared risk and shared reward.
The implications of these discussions were subtle but important. If innovation is now distributed, then the highest value will accrue to those who integrate capability and shorten decision loops, not to those who simply own tools. For us at Datarock, this reinforces that our role isn’t to digitise geology for its own sake, but to help customers move from information to confidence and ultimately, to make better operational decisions, earlier.
If the past few weeks were anything to go by, the question is no longer ‘Will innovation transform the sector?’ but ‘How fast and where can we best operationalise it, and where?’
