Streamlining Mines Act permit tracking with AI

At the Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals, internal users must find and track unique permit conditions often buried in static PDF files. Doing this quickly and easily was a long-standing challenge.

Mines Digital Services set out to improve this process by setting a new goal: the development of a searchable permit library that would save time and improve oversight for the complete lifespan of a permit.

Digging up info

The complexity of managing mining permits had long been a barrier to efficient compliance tracking and permit drafting. The permits can span decades and were stored in PDFs which can be poorly structured and difficult to search. Deep institutional knowledge was often required to find and correctly interpret the right information.

During a recent hackathon, the team experimented with AI prompts to extract key reporting information from these PDFs—with great success. Prior to the hackathon, the team hadn’t considered the use of AI at all, but that breakthrough sparked a bigger idea: What if AI could help solve multiple pain points in the permitting process?

By leveraging AI for both extracting and analyzing permit conditions, Mines Digital Services has transformed this challenge into an opportunity.

Arriving at AI

This project wasn’t originally envisioned as a use case for AI. Our original focus was simply to solve a real business problem identified by our users, and that stayed the same as we began to work with AI.

With that goal clear from the start, we spent a lot of effort (and received a lot of help) on understanding the risks and privacy considerations of accessing and analysing only the information we want to expose to AI, and how we could fit these processes into our current digital workflows before proceeding. We knew that we had both private and public data in our system and wanted to ensure we’d only expose safe data to AI while protecting the information we didn’t want it to access.

By default, we built processes that would help solve the business problem whether or not AI was part of the solution. In the end, we used AI because it was clear that it would add a lot of efficiency.

Permit conditions are now extracted from PDFs, saved as data, and scanned for any reporting requirements. Ministry users verify the output, which is then made available for mining companies to submit reports against directly, helping with compliance tracking after a permit is issued.

Our secure process uses publicly available data and cuts out a lot of manual work for users. It’s a practical solution that just happens to be powered by AI.

Optimized for efficiency

Having permit conditions available in digital form and using AI to identify reporting requirements offers three key benefits:

• It eliminates the need for inspectors to manually track due dates for permit obligations, reducing administrative burden
• It helps improve how permit conditions are written by flagging unclear or missing reporting triggers
• It makes it easier for mining operations to clearly understand what reports they need to submit and when

This new AI-powered process has freed up time to focus on higher-value work like building strong relationships with partners in permitting, reviewing mining applications and following up on cases of non-compliance.

More to be mined

This project didn’t just solve one problem — it opens the door to future improvements. Now that we’ve built a secure, AI-powered process for extracting and tracking permit conditions, we’re exploring how to apply the same approach to other locked-down data. It’s helping us track more key aspects of permit compliance and think bigger about how to reuse proven processes and security patterns across the board.

Not only are permit conditions now searchable and actionable, but the new dynamic condition library supports permit inspectors in both compliance monitoring efforts and decision-making. It’s a step toward smarter, more responsive permitting in the mining sector.

If you’re curious about the mines permit library or want to connect, feel free to reach out to us at MDS@gov.bc.ca.