Lorenzo Tiraboschi, Business Development Manager at Loqsea Technology, spent APPEC 2026 week in Singapore in conversation with market participants from across the energy industry. Two subjects kept coming up: risk management and AI. What stood out was the distance between them. There was strong interest in AI, and far less urgency about the live data it depends on.
The backdrop is record exposure. Singapore Exchange’s total commodities volume rose 21% in its 2026 financial year to 78.8 million lots, while average open interest climbed 24% to a record 4.2 million lots. The infrastructure firms use to manage that exposure has not grown at the same pace, and that gap shapes how much value any AI tool can deliver.
Now in its 42nd year, APPEC is S&P Global Energy’s flagship oil and commodities conference, and the 2026 edition convened around 1,500 industry leaders in Singapore. For Lorenzo, the breadth of who was there mattered more than the scale.
“What struck me was that APPEC isn’t really confined to the conference centre; it plays out across the whole city. There were events happening everywhere, and the mix of people was what made it interesting: attendees from every part of the world, representing a genuinely wide range of market participants.”
A broader market means more firms carrying exposure, and more firms that need a clear, current view of it.
Much of the APPEC audience trades physical oil, and that is where Lorenzo found the automation gap most visible.
“Risk management came up in a few conversations I had. What surprised me most was how much room for improvement there still is on the physical side, particularly around automation. People are making decisions on positions and trades without the live information they actually need, and yet nobody framed that as a problem to solve urgently. It was just the way things are done, which is what stuck with me.”
The underlying problem, decisions made on information that is already out of date, reaches well beyond physical trading. It is one of the frustrations Lorenzo hears from trading desks every week, and one many firms have lived with for so long they no longer notice it.
AI and digitalisation featured among APPEC 2026’s official themes, and the subject carried well beyond the conference programme into the conversations around it.
“As you can imagine, AI is a big part of the conversation right now, and they actually had a few talks about it during the APPEC event. Everyone seems to agree that AI has a place in commodity trading when it comes to execution, reporting and risk management, but it’s not being applied as much as you would think. A lot of market participants are still not using it at all, or are still in the very early stages of adopting AI.”
The research points the same way. ComTech Advisory’s second annual study on AI in energy and commodity trading, published in July, found the industry has moved on from asking whether AI is real to the harder question of getting it from pilot into production. Research from HC Group identifies the main obstacle: most firms trying to scale AI say their data is not organised or accessible enough to support it.
Set alongside the risk conversations, the constraint becomes clear. The live, consolidated data that makes AI useful is the same data many firms are still treating as a problem for another day. It is the case Reza Tareen, Loqsea’s Managing Director, made in August: AI in commodity trading only works on live data.
Risk Manager runs real-time mark-to-market, VaR, margin and reconciliation for commodity derivatives desks, across exchanges including ICE, CME, LME and SGX. Loqsea’s AI works on top of that live data.
“We focus on the risk management and reporting side of things. Loqsea uses AI to take on the long, repetitive tasks that eat up traders’ and risk managers’ time, while also letting them ask direct questions about their trading data and build custom reports on the fly. The result is that people get the information they need quickly, instead of having to dig for it.”
That is the role of Tommy, Loqsea’s AI chatbot for commodity trading analysis: questions asked in plain language, answered from live platform data.
“Oil trading still runs on a lot of manual, repetitive work, especially in the physical space. I went into the event expecting to see how AI and technology are being used in the industry. Instead, most people were still at the stage of asking what it could actually do for them, rather than using it day to day. That gap between interest and adoption is bigger than I expected.”
See how Tommy works, or let us walk you through the platform in the context of how your desk actually runs.
The most common gap is live information. Conversations across APPEC 2026 week pointed to decisions on positions and trades being made without real-time data, especially where automation is limited on the physical side. The problem is widespread but rarely treated as urgent, which is why it persists. Consolidated, real-time risk data is the foundation for closing it.
Interest is growing faster than adoption. AI featured among APPEC 2026’s official themes, and there is broad agreement it has a place in execution, reporting and risk management. In practice, many market participants are not yet using it, or are at a very early stage. Industry research points to data quality and accessibility as the main obstacle to scaling it.
