Katika Labrum is the founder of MineMarket.ai, a mining intelligence platform applying AI to acquirer mapping, transaction intelligence, and deal timing for the global resource sector. She works directly with resource companies and capital allocators on AI integration strategy, including post-PDAC deal intelligence mandates.

By 2027, every PDAC panel will be about mining Artificial Intelligence

The keynotes were excellent. The deals were real. The energy on the floor of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre this week was something this industry has not felt in years.

I know because I was there. Four days on the floor at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Gold sitting above $5,100. 30,000 people from 125 countries. A policy environment that has, finally and genuinely, started to match the urgency the industry has been asking for.

Doug Ford released an accelerated construction schedule for the Ring of Fire road from the conference floor. Prime Minister Carney and India’s Prime Minister Modi signed a formal memorandum of understanding on critical minerals value chains while PDAC was still running. Don Lindsay, former CEO of Teck, told the room from the keynote stage: “The world is more fragmented than it has been in decades.”

All of that is real. All of it matters.

But none of it is what I will be thinking about when I come back here next year.

“The biggest competitive advantage in mining right now is not geology. It is not capital. It is not jurisdiction. It is intelligence. And AI just changed what that word means.”

What I watched happen on that floor

PDAC is where deals happen. I want to be clear about that because I have read too many conference write-ups that treat it as a networking event with better catering. It is not. Financings get structured here. Farm-in conversations start here. Acquisition mandates find their match here. The transactions that follow are real and the numbers are serious.

So when I tell you I watched a pattern repeat itself across four days, I am not talking about atmosphere. I am talking about who left Toronto with something and who did not.

The companies moving fastest were not the ones with the best projects. Some of the most compelling projects were on that floor and went nowhere. What separated the operators who generated real momentum from the ones who had good conversations that will quietly fade was one thing.

They knew exactly who they were walking into the room with before they walked in.

They knew the fund manager’s current mandate. They knew which acquirers had closed a comparable transaction in the last eighteen months and were back in deployment mode. They knew the deal structure their counterparty preferred and they came equipped to speak that language from the first five minutes.

That is not thirty years of relationship capital. That is today’s AI intelligence. And in 2026, intelligence is something you can build before you land at Pearson.

The operators who did not have it spent their most valuable PDAC hours in the wrong conversations. Not through any fault of their own. The information that would have pointed them differently simply was not in their hands.

What the floor does not tell you. The dinner does.

There are two conferences at PDAC. The one on the floor and the one at dinner.

I was invited to both.

The dinners I attended this week were not industry mixers. They were small, private, invitation-only gatherings of the people who actually move capital in this sector. Mining magnates who between them have financed, acquired, and built projects across five continents. The kind of rooms where a comment made between the main course and dessert can set a process in motion that closes six months later.

I sat at those tables. I watched deals happen in real time. Not announced, not pitched, not presented from a slide deck. Decided. Quietly, over a meal, by people who had already done the work of understanding exactly what they were looking at and who they were sitting with.

The floor is where you present. The dinner table is where you decide. And the single topic that kept surfacing in those rooms, in conversations between people who have collectively deployed billions into resource assets, was not gold price. It was not tariffs. It was not the Ring of Fire.

It was this: who has the intelligence advantage going into this cycle.

The investors and acquirers moving fastest right now are not the ones with the deepest contact lists. They are the ones who have built an intelligence infrastructure that tells them what relationships alone cannot. They know which assets are genuinely strategic versus which ones are dressed in the language of the current moment. They know their counterparty before the meeting starts. They know when to move and they know why now.

That is what I watched being discussed at those tables. And it is the reason I am writing this now.

Why three years of AI panels in mining got it wrong

Every mining conference since 2023 has run an AI panel. The arc is reliable: AI will improve drilling accuracy, AI will refine ore grade prediction, AI will make processing more efficient.

True. And completely beside the point.

The AI application that will actually change who wins in this industry is not underground. It is at the table.

Cameron Schuler, Chief Commercialization Officer at the Vector Institute, Canada’s leading AI research and commercialization body, representing thirty large companies and over a trillion dollars in combined industry revenue, opened the Mining Meets AI technical session at PDAC this week with a slide showing their full ecosystem. Two thousand researchers. Thirty large companies. A trillion dollars. His note, live from the stage: no mining or resource companies. “We would like to see more of those,” he said. That absence is not an oversight. It is a measurement of where the intelligence gap currently sits. The industry that most needs AI-driven deal intelligence is the one least represented in the AI institutions building it. That is the window. And it is open right now.

Think about what a serious acquisition decision actually requires. You need to bring together tenement histories, drill results, comparable transaction pricing, the acquirer’s current capital position, jurisdictional regulatory cycles, commodity forecasting, fund mandate alignment, and management team track records. A veteran advisor carries fragments of this from memory. A well-resourced major has analysts who can compile some of it across weeks. A junior explorer or mid-tier operator trying to attract the right capital has almost none of it, or gets it slowly, expensively, and too late.

What AI does is compress time. Not replace judgment. Compress the distance between needing to understand a market and understanding it well enough to move. It surfaces every comparable transaction across a jurisdiction over a decade. It maps active acquirer mandates against available assets right now. It identifies the specific window when a counterparty is most likely to say yes, based on their own deal cycle rather than general market sentiment.

Three capabilities are changing deal outcomes because of this.

Acquirer mapping.  

Operators arriving at PDAC with a ranked list of their ten most likely buyers, based on mandate alignment, recent transaction history, and current capital position, have a fundamentally different set of conversations than operators hoping to find the right person by working the floor. The meeting changes entirely when you know more about the other side of the table than they expect.

Transaction intelligence.  

Comparable deal pricing in this industry has historically lived in the institutional memory of advisors who were in the room when the deals closed. AI makes that memory available to anyone. What farm-in structures actually closed in a given region, at what terms, with what earn-in milestones, and why. That knowledge changes how you negotiate from the very first conversation.

Timing signals.  

The right deal at the wrong moment does not close. AI reads the signals that indicate when a specific counterparty is ready to move. Regulatory approvals, fund deployment cycles, management transitions, commodity inflection points. Timing stops being instinct and becomes something you can actually work from.

Five questions every mining executive should be able to answer. Most cannot.

These are not questions for one type of operator. Whether you are running a producing mine, deploying capital, sitting on an exploration asset, or advising a board, these are the gaps that AI-powered intelligence closes. The executives at PDAC who could answer all five moved differently through that conference than the ones who could not.

1.  What does your counterparty know about you that you do not know about them?

Every meeting in mining has an information asymmetry. The question is which direction it runs. The fund manager you sat across from at PDAC spent the week reviewing your jurisdiction, your management team, your asset stage, and your comparable transactions before you shook hands. Most operators walked in having prepared a deck. The ones with momentum walked in having prepared intelligence. That gap is closeable. Leaving it open is a choice.

2.  Which of your assumptions about your market are based on current data and which are based on habit?

Most mining executives operate from a mental model of their sector that was accurate three years ago. The capital flows have shifted. The acquiring entities have changed. The deal structures preferred in your jurisdiction today are not the ones that closed in 2022. AI does not replace your experience. It updates it. The executives making the sharpest decisions at PDAC 2026 were the ones who knew exactly which parts of their world had moved and which had held.

3.  Where is the capital in your sector actually going right now, and why?

Not where it went last cycle. Not where the conference narrative says it is heading. Specifically: which fund structures are actively deploying, into which jurisdictions, at which asset stages, on what deal terms, in the current market. That is a question most mining executives cannot answer with precision. It is also the question that determines whether your next conversation is with the right person or a very expensive use of your time.

4.  What does your competition know that you do not?

The operators who moved fastest at PDAC were not smarter. They were better informed. The intelligence gap in mining is not an analytical problem. It is an information access problem. The major sitting two booths from you had a team of analysts working their mandate before the conference opened. The junior explorer who walked out with a term sheet had spent three weeks building AI-driven intelligence on exactly who they needed to find. That gap has never been more closeable than it is right now.

5.  Is your intelligence coming to you, or are you still going to find it?

This is the question that will separate the next generation of mining executives from the current one. The world produces more market-moving information every day than any team can manually track. Regulatory changes in competing jurisdictions. Capital movements signalling acquisition appetite. Geopolitical shifts affecting the value of your specific asset to a specific class of buyer. The executives who will define this cycle are not the ones who search for intelligence when they need it. They are the ones who have built a live AI intelligence feed that understands their operation, their position, and their objectives, and delivers the news that matters to them before it matters to everyone else. That is not a luxury. In a cycle moving this fast, it is the infrastructure you cannot afford not to have.

I left Toronto with a waiting list.

Since the conference closed I have been working directly with a select group of operators and capital allocators to build exactly this kind of live AI intelligence infrastructure. Acquirer mapping, transaction comparables, timing signal analysis, and a curated intelligence feed calibrated to their specific operation, position, and objectives.

The operators who engaged before PDAC walked in prepared. The ones engaging now are positioning for the follow-through window. The six to twelve weeks after the conference when the conversations that started on the floor either convert into something real or quietly disappear.

That window is open. It will not stay open.

At PDAC 2027, someone will call this obvious.

They will be right. They will also be twelve months late.

I will be writing about this in a monthly newsletter. The ones already moving will know exactly what I mean.