AI Agents Enter the Core of Nornickel’s Management Operations
Russian mining and metals giant Nornickel is deploying AI agents across its economic management division. The systems are designed to accelerate procurement approvals, reduce documentation errors, and identify hidden operational risks.
Nornickel brought in technology innovation company Reksoft to develop automation tools for budget and project oversight. The restructuring of the company’s business processes began with the automation of control and compliance procedures.
Manual Checks Are on the Way Out
Employees in the economic division previously had to consolidate data manually from multiple incompatible sources while reviewing hundreds of documents for compliance with corporate rules and approved parameters. That slowed procurement approvals, prompting the company to automate the process.
“Together with the Nornickel team, we are transforming control procedures by moving from manual reviews to intelligent agents capable not only of gathering data from unstructured sources and carrying out control procedures, but also of performing advanced analytical scenarios and identifying opportunities to improve efficiency,” said Igor Samochernov, managing director of Reksoft Consulting.
The system already recognizes information from contracts, purchase orders, maintenance requests, and reports, cross-checks data from multiple sources, identifies anomalies, and, in certain scenarios, automatically approves orders.
No Vendor Lock-In
Reksoft developed not only AI agents tailored to the needs of a major industrial enterprise, but also an architecture designed for their long-term deployment. Cloud capacity in Yandex.Cloud is combined with on-premise IT infrastructure, allowing the company to choose where data is processed depending on sensitivity levels. At the same time, the enterprise is not tied to a single vendor and can independently configure open-source large language models for its own operational requirements.
The AI agents will monitor budget execution continuously around the clock. Nornickel expects the automation effort to eliminate routine work for more than 10,000 employees.
AI Development for Mining and Metals
This is not the first joint technology project between Nornickel and Reksoft. In 2024, the companies began developing a program-and-hardware platform using AI and video analytics to optimize the extraction of nonferrous metals from mined ore. At that time, the mining and metals company’s IT portfolio included 119 projects, while digitalization spending totaled roughly 8.7 billion rubles ($~111 million).
In 2025, Nornickel introduced its own AI platform for the metallurgy and mining industries – MetalGPT-1. Using that open-source specialized language model, industrial companies can build AI assistants and autonomous agents tailored to their own production processes.
Today, 80% of the company’s technological equipment is monitored through intelligent systems. Nornickel already uses more than 100 AI agents integrated into 30 business processes.
Measurable Economic Impact
The portfolio of IT systems being deployed by Nornickel is generating measurable economic gains worth more than 10 billion rubles ($~128 million) annually. By 2030, that figure could exceed 50 billion rubles ($~640 million).
Most major industrial companies in Russia already have AI implementation strategies in place. Those initiatives primarily focus on automated monitoring systems, predictive analytics, and AI agents designed to improve management and production efficiency. Businesses are rapidly moving toward system-level AI-driven operational management, integrating those technologies into the core of corporate governance. The trend is accelerating across energy, logistics, metallurgy, and other sectors, pushing the broader economy further toward digital operations.
