Mining Forum Americas 2026 agenda

The mining industry's most consequential operational challenge is no longer geological or geopolitical but organizational: companies that have run successful AI pilots for three years are still struggling to convert them into scaled productivity gains, and the gap between early movers and laggards is widening faster than most boards appreciate.

Developed in partnership with McKinsey, this session addresses that gap directly, organizing the discussion around what successful companies are actually doing differently across data governance, talent architecture, technology selection, and value tracking. It also connects AI deployment to the broader operational transformation underway at the asset level, because companies that treat AI as a standalone initiative rather than as the intelligence layer of a next-generation operating system are consistently underperforming those that do not.

The agenda closes with a frank assessment of where to start, what to scale, what to stop, and how to measure impact over the next 24 months, along with the governance, cybersecurity, and build/buy/partner questions attendees need to be asking now.

Since the end of WWII, the United States built and wielded an arsenal of economic weapons with sanctions, export controls, and investment bans, thereby exercising control over the dollar, advanced semiconductors, and global supply chains as instruments of national power. Today, that playbook has a mirror image: Beijing's tightening grip on critical minerals, and the midstream refining and processing capacity. That has now extended as reshoring accelerates and decades of just-in-time supply chains give way to just-in-case inventories, strategic stockpiles, and allied sourcing mandates. In the new world order, all minerals are critical.

In this keynote, Edward Fishman, a former top U.S. sanctions official, Columbia faculty, and author of the New York Times bestseller Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, takes senior mining investors and operators behind the closed doors where these decisions are made. Drawing on his firsthand experience designing sanctions against Russia and Iran and his deep reporting on the U.S.–China contest over technology and resources, Fishman will lay out the strategic logic now driving Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow, and what it means for the capital flows, jurisdictions, offtake structures, and permitting timelines that shape mining returns across the full commodity complex.

Attendees will leave with a clearer read on the questions that increasingly determine whether a project gets financed, built, and monetized:

• Which jurisdictions and commodities — far beyond the official

Generative AI and the hyperscale data center buildout are emerging as one of the largest new sources of copper demand the industry has faced — on top of everything already required for electrification and grid renewal. This session moves the AI conversation out of the software layer and into the ground: what happens when an industry built on the promise of infinite scale runs into a physical, decade-long supply chain? Panelists unpack the emerging demand math, where near-term supply is — and isn't — coming from, and what it means for developers, financiers, and utilities racing to keep pace.