Caterpillar

Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) is the world's largest maker of construction and mining equipment, and a leader in autonomous mining through its Cat MineStar suite — in particular MineStar Command, which delivers driverless autonomous haulage and full fleet management for large open-pit mines. Cat's autonomous trucks operate without a cab operator, coordinated by AI and high-precision positioning, and the company reports hundreds of them running across three continents having hauled billions of tonnes, with mines such as Vale's and Freeport's scaling their fleets and an ambition of more than 2,000 autonomous trucks by 2030. This is one of the most concrete, at-scale applications of AI and autonomy in heavy industry. Caterpillar is a genuine AI-and-autonomy vendor; the technology is proven and productive, and its adoption tracks mining capital spending and the economics of removing operators from haul trucks.

Caterpillar is now applying that experience well beyond mining. Chief technology officer Jaime Mineart frames the hard part of physical AI as integration rather than algorithms — getting the technology to work on a customer's actual jobsite. The company operates about 1.6 million connected assets generating roughly 16 petabytes of structured machine data, and has committed $100 million over five years to retrain a workforce of about 118,000 as operators shift from running one machine to supervising several remotely. The product line spans autonomous haul trucks, drills, underground loaders and dozers alongside software: a voice-driven Cat AI Assistant that walks technicians through repairs, digital-twin and site-scanning tools, and internal AI used for legacy-code modernization and defect detection. One second-order effect matters for anyone tracking the AI buildout — Caterpillar's power-generation division, which sells engines and gensets into data centers, grew sales 72% in the second quarter of 2026.