ICMM has appointed Froydis Cameron-Johansson as its next President and CEO, effective 23 November 2026, succeeding Rohitesh Dhawan after more than five years in the role. Cameron-Johansson brings senior global leadership experience from major mining houses, positioning her to influence ICMM’s work on tailings governance, Scope 3 emissions and responsible sourcing standards across its 26 member companies. Leadership continuity at ICMM matters for operators because its frameworks often feed directly into site-level ESG criteria, investor due diligence, and permitting expectations.

Record metals and mining returns entering 2026 are being driven largely by gold, with sector-wide market capitalisation at an all-time high and balance sheets among the strongest in a decade, McKinsey’s Global Materials Perspective 2026 reports. Behind the headline numbers, overall industry productivity has stalled and value creation is increasingly concentrated in a small group of top-quartile performers. For operators, this points to growing pressure to extract more value from existing assets through operational excellence, brownfield debottlenecking and disciplined capital allocation rather than volume-led growth.

Bergbau has launched its Planning Agent, an AI-driven mine planning tool that converts plain-language instructions into mine designs, production schedules and reports. In a training demonstration, the system processed a full study from block model through optimisation, pit or stope design, sequencing and resource-constrained scheduling to final reporting in about one working day. For planners, this points to rapid iteration on scenarios and reduced manual hand-offs between traditional packages, while still relying on engineers to validate geotechnical, haulage and processing assumptions.