Caterpillar’s AI Autonomy Efforts Accelerate, But Domain Knowledge Drives Returns
Executive Summary
Caterpillar says its autonomous equipment efforts are accelerating, but the company is focused on using its domain knowledge as the differentiation as it trains its world models. Speaking at CoreWeave’s Fully Connected 2026 conference in San Francisco, Brandon Hootman, vice president of physical AI platforms and construction autonomy at Caterpillar, said the company has worked on autonomy for more than a decade, but those efforts have largely been in structured environments.
Hootman said Caterpillar’s autonomy efforts have focused on structured environments such as mine sites, where haul roads follow patterns. Construction sites have an unstructured dynamic because humans and machines operate in close quarters. “It was only just three or four years ago that the dream of being able to bring autonomous operations to a construction site almost felt unrealistic,” Hootman said.
“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."
