Blog

Sometimes technical, sometimes business

You'll find articles that are sometimes technical, sometimes about business, but hopefully always useful and good company.

Lichens

Moving mining compliance off Excel

Compliance requirements keep piling up in the mining industry, while office tools like Excel are showing their limits. Purpose-built software lets you centralize the data, standardize the processes, and turn compliance into a genuine strategic lever.

Étienne Larivière3 min
Artificial intelligence

AI: tool, or creative teammate?

Is artificial intelligence just a tool, or a genuine creative teammate? Seen through the lens of the mining industry, this piece argues that lasting value doesn't come from the tool itself, but from how teams learn to work alongside it.

Étienne Larivière4 min
Artificial intelligence

AI: a lever for production

Artificial intelligence is a powerful lever for the mining sector, but on its own it doesn't deliver a lasting competitive advantage. What counts isn't the tool, but how it is built into a strategy, a culture and a business model.

Étienne Larivière4 min
Artificial intelligence

How equipment manufacturers build technology products that resist obsolescence

To become genuine strategic partners to mining companies, equipment manufacturers and contractors have to design equipment that is durable, modular and data-generating. By turning every machine into a source of AI-usable data, they deliver better asset availability and a stronger ability to anticipate.

Étienne Larivière4 min
Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence in service of collective decision-making

In a mining sector facing growing challenges around safety, regulation, performance and social licence, collective decision-making is becoming a strategic issue. This article explores how artificial intelligence can structure complexity, speed up consensus and become a genuine competitive lever for mining governance.

Étienne Larivière4 min
Artificial intelligence

A partnership between Lichens and Baseline

Lichens is announcing a strategic partnership with Baseline, a firm specialized in artificial intelligence, to offer a joint service package built for the mining and metal processing industries. The alliance will be showcased at the CIM Connect and CTM events in May.

Étienne Larivière2 min
Artificial intelligence

Navigating AI: choosing the right solution for each task

With AI tools and models multiplying, this article helps you pick the right approach for the job at hand. It sets out the main families of tasks — classification, regression, object detection, segmentation, anomaly detection, content generation and reinforcement learning — and illustrates their concrete applications in mining.

Étienne Larivière6 min
Build

Everything you need to know about 3D reconstruction techniques

3D reconstruction techniques are emerging as powerful tools for industrial inspection, creating detailed digital replicas of objects that can be examined from every angle. This article clarifies the field's common technical terms — inputs, outputs and processes — and what they're used for.

Étienne Larivière9 min
BaselineXLichens

Digitizing paper forms with AI

Digital transformation notwithstanding, paper forms are still very much alive in several sectors — for environmental reasons, for time on site, and for digital skills. Lichens proposes an automatic digitization station using character recognition and artificial intelligence to make field data capture faster and more reliable.

Benoit M. Bédard2 min
Business

Turning a digital plan into reality

Not an end in itself, a digital plan is one more step toward modernizing an organization: a technology roadmap for making strategic objectives real. This piece offers a working thesis for carrying one through, from defining measurable objectives to training staff and managing change.

Benoit M. Bédard8 min
Technical

Putting open-licence LLMs to work on private data in the mining sector

A large language model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence model able to generate text and carry out many other tasks. This article explains how open-licence LLMs, deployed on site, make it possible to exploit private mining data while preserving confidentiality and security.

Benoit M. Bédard8 min