Industry 4.0 term came into common use in Kazakhstan in 2017, when the head of state announced the need to digitize the industry. Automation of production is an inevitable process. At each industrial enterprise, eventually they come to the realization that harmful, heavy, or simply complicated manual labor can be replaced by artificial intelligence. The basic principle of Industry 4.0 is the symbiosis of machines and human, the use of cyber-physical systems in production. For this, the algorithms of neural networks are used, which appeared in the 80s of the last century, but could not be used as effectively as now, due to insufficient computing power.
Despite the efforts of the state and business to separate from the raw materials economy, the mining sector still remains the basis of Kazakhstan. These are companies competing on a global level, with complex business processes; they existed on the territory of the country before independence. Nevertheless, it was these enterprises that turned out to be the best prepared for the fourth industrial revolution and the introduction of digital control principles.
It was necessary to begin the work on digitalization of industry with the collection of information and analysis of the current situation. Therefore, representatives of Kazakh Institute for the development of industry, together with the German Institute of Faunhofer, studied more than 600 Kazakh enterprises. The results of this work showed that more than half of mining companies are at the level of semi-automated production. 7 of them became model factories where smart mines are created now, using geolocation and other digital solutions.