Maxim Kuzemchenko
MK
MAXIM KUZEMCHENKO · DUBAI

The execution layer Between intelligence
and the real world.

AI is getting smarter every month. Physical operations aren't. Between them sits a layer nobody owns — where a decision turns into throughput, cycle time, and margin. That is what I work on.

CEO — WORLD'S LARGEST SINGLE MINING OPERATION BY ROCK VOLUME CO-FOUNDER — OES, INDUSTRIAL AI, DUBAI BUILT THE ONLY MINING FLEET RUN BY MULTI-AGENT AI COORDINATION
Maxim Kuzemchenko
THE CATEGORY

AI knows what to do. The pit doesn't care.

Between a model's recommendation and a ton on a ship there is a layer nobody owns: dispatch, sequencing, maintenance windows, the shift supervisor's judgement at 3 a.m. Every failed pilot I've seen died there, not in the model.

I call it the execution layer. It is not a product category yet — it is where the value of industrial AI will actually be captured over the next decade.

ABOUT

I've spent 25 years running heavy industry: coal, steel, precious metals, and freight railcars.

I started underground, at Russia's largest underground coal producer, and later served as deputy CEO of Polymetal, one of the world's major precious-metals miners.

At United Wagon Company I ran business development and international expansion:

2 joint ventures With railroad blue chips Wabtec and Timken — technology transferred into local production, not licensed on paper.
2 new plants Justified and built alongside the original works.
4 markets Railcars and components shipped to the United States, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.
Both languages Engineering degrees, then an MBA at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and Singularity University. Western boardrooms and Eurasian pits speak differently; I negotiate in both.

{{ vgkStatus }} East Mining Company (EMCO), which operates the Solntsevsky Coal Mine. I joined in 2019, when it was a mid-sized regional producer. Four things came out of it:

3.6× rock volume By million m³ moved a year — the way miners measure scale — Solntsevsky is now the largest single mining operation in the world. Not the biggest coal producer: the biggest earth-mover.
2.5× coal output From 7 to 18.5 million tons a year, exported across the Asia-Pacific.
The port We built Shakhtersk into the largest terminal of its kind — it holds the world record for monthly and annual roadstead transshipment among shallow-water coal ports.
23 km of conveyor Among the three largest trunk conveyor systems on the planet and the longest enclosed environmental gallery in the coal industry anywhere — feeding the world's largest automated single-operation coal stockpile.

Nobody was going to close the gap between the model and the machine from the outside, so we built the layer ourselves — and then spun it out.

OES, 2021 Born inside the mine as a fleet management system, grown into a proprietary industrial IoT platform, now a company of its own in Dubai. Some fifteen pilots and implementations across Eurasia and Africa.
AI layer, 2024–25 About a hundred agents dispatching trucks, balancing shovels, coaching operators. The first two-tier multi-agent platform in commercial mining operation anywhere — coordination tier balances haulage across the pit in real time, execution tier returns cycles to standard by talking to the operator directly. Human in the loop by design.
The result +29% stripping productivity · +18% excavator utilization · −13% loading cycle · −19% CO₂ per unit.
Taskana The same execution layer for teams: machines on one end, people on the other.

I live in Dubai. EU citizen. I write and speak about what it takes to make AI real in the physical world.

NUMBERS
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Open-pit mine, working benches
THE PIT — SOLNTSEVSKY, SAKHALIN
Coal seaport stockyard and stacker-reclaimer
THE PORT — SHAKHTERSK
CONTACT

The best way to reach me is email.
NOW
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WRITING

A long-form piece on the execution layer — why AI pilots die on contact with physical reality — comes in late 2026. If you want it when it's out, write me.