Ask yourself these questions:

• A junior buyer now does in 10 minutes what once took half a week. Is that progress, or a problem?
• If AI produces great outputs, how do we know whether our people are actually good at their jobs?
• Are we building the smartest procurement teams in history, or just the fastest ones with no idea what they're doing?

Maritime procurement has never moved faster, and that is exactly what worries Rick Ackermann. In his keynote at IMPA London 2026, The Advantages of Modern Buying and the Risk of Knowing Less, Rick opens with a confession and closes with a challenge. AI, he argues, is the best thing to happen to procurement: it has killed the boring work, unlocked real-time insight, and given teams capabilities that would have seemed extraordinary just a decade ago.

But it has also quietly introduced something far more dangerous than inefficiency: the illusion of competence. Join Rick as he takes delegates through the superpower, the quiet cost, and the fix.

The Superpower and the Quiet Cost

Rick's session doesn't set out to make a case against AI. Quite the opposite. He celebrates the gains the profession has made, faster decisions, richer data, tools that would have been unimaginable to a buyer working a decade ago. But he pairs that celebration with a warning that many in the industry recognise but rarely say out loud: as the tools get better, are we developing the next generation of buyers, or simply inheriting a workforce that has never had to learn the job the hard way?

It's a distinction with real consequences. A buyer who can operate a system fluently isn't necessarily a buyer who understands the commercial situation behind it. When a negotiation gets difficult, a supplier pushes back, or a decision doesn't have a clean data answer, the gap between "knows how to use the tool" and "knows how to do the job" stops being theoretical.

It's a keynote built to make delegates rethink what "good" actually looks like in a procurement team, not just how fast that team can move.

Rick Ackermann, Head of Procurement, BW LPG

Rick is the Head of Procurement at BW LPG. He is instrumental in building the company’s Sustainable Procurement strategy globally, in additional to driving procurement innovation and risk management. Rick is a change management expert and a motivational leader and leads a team of trained procurement professionals. Prior to BW LPG, he had successfully set up procurement functions in many corporate organisations and was involved in large-scale projects such as the bullion-dollar Boskalis-Penta Ocean joint venture in Pulau Tekong in Singapore. His keynote at IMPA London 2026 draws on decades of hard-won experience to ask the question the industry has been avoiding.

"AI is not the problem. Blind efficiency is. In procurement, speed is useful, but judgement is everything."

The Conversation Continues: The Leadership Debate

Rick's keynote doesn't stand alone. It's the opening argument in a wider conversation that runs across the entire morning of Day One, and it comes to a head in the Leadership Debate: Perspectives on Talent, Knowledge and the Next Generation of Procurement Professionals, immediately following the networking lunch.

The debate takes the tension Rick raises and puts it directly to a panel of senior procurement leaders: as processes mature and tools proliferate, is the depth of knowledge being developed by the next generation of buyers keeping pace with what the role truly demands? What are the consequences for commercial performance, supplier relationships and operational resilience if it isn't? And what must industry leaders do, now, to reverse the trend?

Joining Rick on the panel:

• Fiona Kerr, Head of Procurement, North Star, who leads a team where over 70% of staff are in the first few years of their procurement careers
• Joanne McCulloch, Global Head of Fleet Procurement & Logistics, V.Group
• Alex Drew, Group Procurement Director, FLEET Management Limited

Together, they carry Rick's opening provocation into a live, unscripted debate about what the industry owes the next generation of buyers, and what happens if it fails to deliver.

Why This Morning Matters

Taken together, Rick's keynote and the Leadership Debate form the emotional and intellectual core of Day One at IMPA London 2026. This isn't a session about resisting AI or slowing down modernisation. It's a session about making sure the profession doesn't mistake speed for skill, and about what leaders need to build, deliberately, so that judgement doesn't quietly disappear while everything else gets faster.

In collaboration with the Global Maritime Procurement Council (GMPC)

Why This Agenda Matters

What stands out across both days is the throughline: this isn't an event built around abstract trends. It's built around the tension procurement leaders are living with right now: how to modernise without losing institutional knowledge, how to hit ESG targets with real accountability, and how to adopt AI without outsourcing judgement. With speakers from BW LPG, North Star, V.Group, FLEET Management, Scorpio Group, ShipServ, Oldendorff Carriers, Breakwater, ProcureShip, Wilhelmsen, Closelink, and NARWHAL PROJECT all in the room, the debates promise to be as candid as the session titles suggest.

IMPA London 2026 takes place 22–23 September at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, Westminster, London.

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