EBG | Xperience Malmö | April 28, 2026
On April 28th, EBG | Xperience returns to Malmö – and with it, a half-day designed around something procurement events rarely priorities: leadership.
Not leadership as a buzzword. Leadership as the practice of creating conditions where skilled teams can actually move forward. Where complexity becomes navigable. Where technology serves the people using it rather than the other way around.
EBG | Xperience gathers 30 senior procurement leaders – one per company – in a closed setting to share what they are genuinely working through. These are real practices, not best practices. Participants can expect honest conversations, not polished performances.
What makes this format distinctive is the ratio of listening to doing. Each session pairs a short reflection with extended roundtable discussion. The small groups work through the same strategic tensions together. The day includes diagnostic mapping exercises that help participants locate where their organizations actually stand. Importantly, the focus is not on where they wish they were.
Event partners play an active role throughout. They open the day by sharing where their expertise lies, then contribute a short perspective on how they see the themes evolving based on their experience. Crucially, they are also present during roundtable discussions. They are listening, engaging, and adding their know-how to the conversation. Notably, it is a format built on everyone in the room contributing, regardless of which side of the table they sit on.
Malmö concludes the 2026 series, following Stockholm on April 23. That means participants in Malmö benefit from insights already surfaced by Nordic procurement leaders five days earlier. Real patterns and shared challenges carry forward into the closing conversation.
The day circles around three strategic themes, all rooted in the same core question: how do we develop procurement organizations and leadership that are genuinely future-fit and adaptable?
Building Teams That Can Actually Act
How do you give skilled teams the mandate to execute without losing governance? What does empowerment actually look like when the ground keeps shifting?
Managing Complexity You Can’t Control
Procurement leaders are accountable for risk, compliance, and sustainability beyond Tier 1 visibility. How do you prioritize when everything is labelled critical?
Making Technology Work for You
Nearly half of procurement organizations face pressure to automate while simultaneously facing budget freezes. What does “AI-ready” really mean when you are already stretched thin?
These themes are not abstract. They emerged from real data – surveys of Nordic procurement leaders show that 74% rate their teams as digitally “developing,” 75% lack visibility beyond their first tier of suppliers, and 60% are exploring but not yet implementing AI, largely due to data quality challenges. The conversations in Malmö start from these realities and push toward what is possible.
The Speakers
We are proud to welcome three leaders whose work sits right at the intersection of these themes. Each brings a different vantage point – organizational design, operating model evolution, and technology adoption during transformation. However, they share something important: they speak from lived experience, and they are willing to share what they are still figuring out.
Lotta Berg Carlsson | Vice President Procurement, Arjo
Lotta Berg Carlsson joined Arjo in 2023 after years at Ericsson, where she held leadership roles across sourcing, category management, and operational efficiency. At Arjo, she leads a global procurement organization of around 100 people. Her focus is on building clarity around roles, competencies, and structures that enable the team to deliver on what matters most to the business.
Her keynote – From Diagnosis to Alignment: A Leadership Perspective on Reshaping Procurement – takes on one of the most fundamental leadership questions in procurement today: how do you set up an organization so that everyone can deliver on what matters most, and keep it that way as demands evolve?
Lotta has spent the past two years reshaping procurement at Arjo. She has brought clarity to how roles are defined, what competencies they require, and how structures support the way work actually needs to get done. It is not about fixing what is broken – it is about creating alignment so people can be empowered to act, and future-proofing the organization for what is coming. The harder part is not building the framework. On the contrary, it is enabling teams to move forward when the ground keeps shifting.
Lotta will share how she understood where the organization was and where it needed to be. She will explain what it takes to align roles, structures, and processes so they support what the business actually needs. She will also discuss how leaders can empower teams to act even when certainty is not available.
Dilip Nair | Global Head of Operational Excellence and Innovation, A.P. Moller – Maersk
Dilip Nair has spent nearly 24 years at Maersk, leading everything from global equipment operations to his current role driving operational excellence and innovation in procurement. He has seen operating models evolve many times. However, his view is that what is happening now is a fundamental shift, not just a technology upgrade.
His keynote – Evolving Operating Models: A Leadership Perspective on What’s Actually Changing – addresses what many procurement leaders sense but few have articulated clearly: the human role is moving from transaction processing to insight translation. That demands different talent, different training, and leaders willing to ask harder questions about where the real competitive edge lies.
AI is part of the picture, but the leadership challenge is broader. Dilip will share what is actually shifting in the operating model and what that means for how procurement creates value. He will explain where leadership focus needs to go in terms of talent development, data stewardship, and building confidence in interpreting and challenging insights. Furthermore, he will show why current training approaches are becoming obsolete, and what leaders must do differently to evolve alongside their teams.
John Everett | CPO / VP of Global Procurement, Novonesis
John Everett joined Novonesis just as Denmark’s largest-ever merger was taking shape. It was a significant and complex transformation bringing two companies together across policies, systems, tools, teams, and supply relationships.
His keynote – From Complexity to Clarity: AI Powering Procurement’s Internal Interactions – tells the story of how, during the successful execution of the merger and while ramping up sustainability focus, the team also leveraged and rolled out an AI-based tool to massively improve internal user interaction and satisfaction with procurement. It eliminates the transactional noise that keeps category managers from doing strategic work. Therefore, it breaks down the barriers that have made procurement difficult to engage with.
John will share how Novonesis built an AI assistant embedded in existing tools that is policy-aware and handles complexity so people do not have to. He will explain what this frees procurement to do – less time on “how do I buy this?” questions and more time on supplier relationships and stakeholder partnerships. In addition, he will describe what it takes to deliver transformation during major organizational change, not after it.
The Day at a Glance
EBG | Xperience Malmö runs from 09:30 to 15:00, with a structure designed to maximize peer exchange.
Participation is free of charge and application-based. We approve participants to ensure role diversity, company diversity, and fit with the strategic themes. This is exclusively for in-house procurement leaders – applications from consultants or solution providers will not be approved.
If you are interested in joining as a Focus Day partner – contact us asap.