Caterpillar's AI autonomy efforts accelerate, but domain knowledge drives returns

Caterpillar said its autonomous equipment efforts are accelerating, but the company is focused on using its domain knowledge as the differentiation as it trains models.

Speaking at CoreWeave's Fully Connected 2026 conference in San Francisco, Brandon Hootman, VP of physical AI platforms and construction autonomy at Caterpillar, said the company has been working on autonomy for more than a decade, but the efforts have been largely in structured environments.

Hootman said Caterpillar's autonomy efforts have focused on structured environments such as mine site where haul roads followed patterns. Construction sites have an unstructured dynamic because humans and machines operate in close quarters.

"It was only just three or four years ago where the dream of being able to bring autonomy operations to a construction site almost felt unrealistic," said Hootman. "But if you look at what has happened in the industry and the move to agency, real reasoning and models that can perceive the world around them that's exciting."

In recent days, Caterpillar has announced the following:

• An expansion of autonomous hauling with Luck Stone. Caterpillar hauled more than 3.5 million tons autonomously in an 18-month pilot. Caterpillar and Luck Stone are now expanding autonomous hauling at two other sites.
• The company announced a partnership with FieldAI to leverage robotics, digital wins and Nvidia technologies at job sites. Early applications include autonomous inspections, digital twins of facilities and job sites and simulation as well as AI-driven insights.

Hootman said Caterpillar will be adding to its autonomous equipment news flow in the near future. Caterpillar has been training its Nvidia-based models, outlined at CES 2026, on CoreWeave's platform.

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Does this mean Caterpillar will start looking like an AI lab? Hootman said no way. "We've got 100 years of serving our customers in our industries. We see that as a real advantage as industries transform," said Hootman. "We start with our customers and that's different than we've done technology development before."

Hootman said:

"We bring customers in early so we can understand how the technology and autonomy fits in with their workflows and we can drive value," said Hootman. "We work with AI leaders but what we bring to market is 100 years of experience, a vast amount of data from job sites and the ability to scale."

Caterpillar is seen as a good example of enterprises using CoreWeave to train their own models as the company expands its AI efforts. A big theme at CoreWeave Fully Connected 2026 is physical AI.

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CoreWeave’s physical AI efforts

Leading up to CoreWeave’s user conference, CEO Michael Intrator said Caterpillar is “a great example of enterprise consumer coming to us and saying, hey, the way that we're going to participate with our company in artificial intelligence, the way that we're going to train our models, the way that we're going to serve our models is going to look different than it has historically. We're going to build our own clusters.”

On CoreWeave’s second quarter earnings call, Intrator said the company is using the company and its Nvidia Vera Rubin systems to “support Caterpillar’s physical AI training and inference at industrial scale.”

Intrator said CoreWeave is emerging as an AI cloud participant and a hyperscaler within the broader AI system. He added that enterprises are looking for more control over their data, model training and AI compute.

“Enterprises are going in with eyes wide open, which provides us with the opportunity to say, ‘we can assist you beyond what has been an oligopoly of three massive companies,” said Intrator. “We have a different way of providing the compute that will be most performant to you and that drives cost down.