Tacit Knowledge as Critical Infrastructure

17 Apr 2026

The Asset No Mine Has in Its Inventory: Expert Operational Knowledge

A methodology for capturing the tacit knowledge of veteran operators before it retires with them — and the architecture to make that knowledge available to every future shift

The NTT DATA and MIT Technology Review study on mining autonomy in Latin America (2025) found that lack of specialized talent is the second most cited barrier to advancing autonomy — mentioned by 27.54% of the executives surveyed. But behind that aggregate figure lie two distinct problems. The first is the difficulty of attracting digital-native profiles to the sector. The second, more urgent and less visible, is the systematic loss of decades of accumulated operational knowledge as the most experienced generation in the industry reaches retirement age. 85% of mining’s most experienced personnel will retire in the next eight years. That knowledge — the correlations a veteran operator sees before any sensor detects them, the exception criteria that no procedure captures, the interdependencies between systems that only 22 years in the same operation reveal — is infrastructure. It has a quantifiable replacement cost. And unlike a broken conveyor belt, no one has it in their asset register.

This whitepaper is the third pillar of NTT DATA’s Mining Autonomy Operating Model — The Organization layer. It presents the Knowledge Condenser methodology: a three-stage structured process — elicitation, structuring, and transfer — that converts tacit operational knowledge into a formal resource the operational intelligence system can actively use. Not archived. Used. In every shift, by every successor, at exactly the moment they need the criterion of the expert who is no longer in the room.

You can access to the content in Spanish in this link

Download the Tacit Knowledge as Critical Infrastructure Whitepaper

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