Caterpillar to spend $100M training 118,000 on AI, autonomy

Caterpillar plans to spend $100 million over five years training its 118,000 employees on AI, autonomy and robotics, CTO Jaime Mineart told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas, framing the rollout as an extension of the company's decades of autonomous mining work rather than a fresh AI bet.

"Now we're in this super exciting time where we can take all of that learning from mining and bring it into much more dynamic environments," Mineart said. Mineart puts the bottleneck outside the model layer: "The hard part about autonomy and about physical AI is incorporating that technology into the customer jobsite."

Caterpillar has about 1.6 million connected assets globally and more than 16 petabytes of structured data, feeding tools including the voice-activated Cat AI Assistant for field technicians, digital twin software for manufacturing analysis, and, per Mineart, "AI agents to modernize legacy code, generate and test new software, and identify defects earlier." That agent-for-legacy-code use case sits alongside 390 other agent stories we've logged in the last 90 days.

CEO Joe Creed, on the data-center demand still lifting Caterpillar's power-generation division, said "no one is slowing down" on cloud computing and generative AI infrastructure. The company's quarterly revenue reached an all-time high of $20.5 billion in the second quarter, with its power-generation division seeing sales spike 72% to $3.10 billion.