Every year, Commodities People, the organisation behind the Commodity Trading Week conference series, publishes an annual industry report with insights drawn from its global events programme.
The 2025 edition compiles data from registration surveys, live audience polls, and sentiment questionnaires gathered across in-person conferences and online events. Altogether, the report reflects input from over 7,000 professionals, 48% of whom are commodity traders, with expert commentary including from Gen10 CEO Richard Williamson.
A landscape defined by geopolitical risk
It will be unsurprising to most that geopolitics dominates the risk landscape. An overwhelming 85% of respondents identified geopolitical tensions and trade policies as the single biggest factor affecting commodity prices in 2025, while 72% of risk professionals named supply chain disruption from political instability as the biggest risk facing commodity trading over the next two years.
Since the report was published, events have only reinforced this view. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the ongoing US–Iran conflict in early 2026 has created what the IEA has described as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. With roughly 20 million barrels per day of crude exports disrupted, and impacts spreading from energy into aluminium, fertilisers, and petrochemicals, commodity firms have been forced to rapidly reassess exposures, reroute shipments, and manage cascading effects through their supply chains.
This is exactly the kind of scenario that stress-tests every part of a trading operation. And it raises a question: when a disruption of this scale hits, how quickly can your organisation identify which shipments are affected, which counterparties are exposed, and what mitigation actions are available? How is that information communicated internally, and how are clients kept informed?
For many firms, the honest answer is: not quickly enough. The bottleneck is rarely a lack of market awareness. It is an operational inability to pull together the right data fast enough to act on it.
Risk appetites have shifted toward conservatism
The report shows that 60% of organisations have become more conservative over the past 12 months, 20% significantly so, and 40% slightly. Only 13% described themselves as slightly more aggressive. Notably, not a single organisation among those polled was pursuing an overtly aggressive growth strategy.
In this climate, when risk is more prevalent and commodity firms more cautious, operational risk stands out as the one area where organisations can take proactive control. You cannot control geopolitics, tariffs, or the weather. But you can control your processes, your data, and the systems your teams rely on to make decisions.
Geopolitical risk cannot be managed without operational foundations
The industry is overwhelmingly focused on external risks right now, and rightly so. But the ability to respond to those risks depends entirely on operational readiness. AI-driven analytics tools can assess supply chain disruptions in real time and help both traders and operators respond to shocks. But without a commodity management foundation that shares the necessary data across the organisation, AI has nothing reliable to work with.
When things change suddenly; a shipping route closes, a counterparty falls under sanctions, a supplier becomes unreliable, the immediate need is not for better market analysis. It is for clear, real-time information about your own positions; which contracts are affected, where your stock is, and what alternatives are available. If that information is spread across disconnected systems, spreadsheets, and email inboxes, the response will be slow, error-prone, and potentially costly.
Operational risk is pervasive
The report confirms what many in the industry already know but rarely address. Only 35% of respondents report consistent data flows between their CTRM, ERP, and treasury systems. Half of all firms surveyed run multiple CTRM systems, and 65% lack consistent data transformation tools.
Most operational risk stems from human factors: copying information incorrectly, failing to follow processes, or building workarounds because systems don’t match the way people actually work. AI and Commodity Management Systems can address many of these issues. Tasks that once took hours, such as generating reports, extracting contract details, and reconciling data across systems can now be completed in minutes, and completely automatically, with no chance of human error.
The largest losses in commodity operations frequently come from mistakes rather than from market movements: a missed update, an incorrect data entry, an unread contract clause. Commodity Management Systems that automate processes and eliminate repetitive manual work protect the business from these costly errors.
Paperwork and spreadsheets are inherited risks
The volume of paperwork involved in sourcing, storing, and shipping commodities creates many potential operational risks. And yet the report finds that 75% of firms have only partial automation in their trade operations.
This is especially important in the current environment. When sourcing strategies change at short notice, teams need to be able to verify information quickly, onboard new counterparties without errors, and ensure that mandatory documentation for an unfamiliar geography is complete and correct. Automated controls and approval workflows within a Commodity Management System directly reduce these risks.
Spreadsheets have a place in commodity trading, but that place is in reporting and analysis, they should not be the tools you use to run your business. The risks are well documented: overwritten formulae, multiple versions of the same file, and copying errors between systems have all caused material losses.
These are all human errors. And when people are operating in an environment that is more high-pressure and urgent than usual, that is precisely when they are most likely to make the kind of mistake that proves costly.
Do new systems mitigate or reinforce operational risk?
AI tools can extract data from PDFs, emails, and unstructured documents, normalise it, and feed it directly into reporting and management systems, reducing the manual copying that is one of the most common sources of operational error. But the report also shows that 43% of firms cite integration with existing systems as the biggest challenge in adopting AI.
Poorly integrated AI creates new data silos rather than eliminating old ones, introducing more points where information must be copied, reconciled, or interpreted between systems. And that says nothing of the governance and cybersecurity risks that come with adopting AI without clear policies and controls.
As Richard Williamson noted in his contribution to the report, AI must be applied with discipline and care, grounded in trusted data and deep domain expertise, or it risks introducing new inconsistency and costly errors rather than solving old ones.
Now is the time to act on operational risk
Geopolitical and operational risks left unmanaged can wipe you out – that is the level of risk we discuss here. But with the right preparation, you can navigate unanticipated risks more smoothly, and even potentially take advantage of them when your competition are still reacting.
Managing your operational risks through the right Commodity Management System is the starting point in moving beyond reacting to proactively managing these external risks. A good Commodity Management System can help put you in a better place where you can respond, react and perhaps even profit from disruptive events.
To find out more, explore Gen10’s whitepaper on Simplifying Complexity in Commodity Trading.
