The Trends in Automotive Logistics Conference 2025: You Can’t Make It Without People and Resilient Systems

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Artificial intelligence, electromobility, regulations and fears around competition from China. The automotive sector’s future is in many respects unclear, yet despite this, it is essential for companies to develop a digital factory. Tangible tips, paths and experience are offered once again by yet another year of the Trends in Automotive Logistics conference, coming up on 20 May 2025 in Pilsen. Roman Žák, the co-founder of Aimtec and head of its advisory board, welcomes you to this event with a deep tradition and international impact. 

This new year of Trends in Automotive Logistics bears a subtitle with a daring turn of phrase: “Digital. Future-Proof?” What does “-proof” here mean to you?  

Whenever I’m speaking with our customers or competitors – or listening to speakers at conferences in Czechia and the German-speaking countries – everyone agrees that digitalisation has become a matter of course. And it is the ability to digitalise that has become a firm part of the demands placed on every manager in logistics and manufacturing.  

However, many companies fear that resilient-yet-accessible digitalisation is an unattainable goal. Yet at the TAL conference, we show how it is possible to attain it. The key lies in systematically developing digital competencies across teams, proper reporting of BI and KPIs and high-quality master and transaction data as the foundation leading to goals such as the strategic use of AI.  

The last few years have been truly rich in challenges. The pandemic, labour shortage, electromobility, sustainability… What is, in your eyes, the “scariest” thing out there for logistics and manufacturing?  

What’s most frightening is the very uncertainty. Nobody really has any idea how things will truly work out with regulations and penalisation, infrastructure, the real sales numbers for EVs, the Chinese competition and whether and how many new projects will arrive. The only way to prepare for this unclear future is to maximise flexibility for our systems – and our teams. And this is exactly what we try to focus on every year when preparing TAL. This year once again we’ve prepared a mix of experience from real-world digitalisation projects, tech innovations and global players’ visions, which offer ways to build up a truly resilient framework for a digital factory. 

We’ve maintained TAL’s tradition of joining up with  German-Czech Chamber of Industry and Commerce and IHK Regensburg, thanks to which we’ve managed to cover a much wider spectrum of experience – one reaching far beyond just the Czech and German borders. Additionally, this year our guests can look forward to an expert panel discussion, through which we wish to maximise TAL’s authenticity and the topicality of information from the industry. 

Which speaker from previous years do you often think about? And can you already reveal a favourite or two for this year? 

I definitely must recall one of the best-rated presentations in our conference’s history – and that means the one by Jan Čermák and Petr Chaluš from Bosch, which met with deep interest from both the organisers and the audience, because it was so concrete and allowed us to gain insight into a company’s systems. 

In terms of general trends and worldview, I’ll never forget the presentation by Milan Zelený, Professor Emeritus at Fordham University in New York, who sadly passed away last year.  

This year, I’m excited for example about speakers like Tobias Mayer (General Manager for IT Supply Chain at BMW Group) and Michal Štěrba (CEO at GZ Media). 

Has the profile of the ideal participant changed over the 24 years of this conference’s existence? Who are the people that benefit from TAL?  

We might call the first few years a regional Czech and Slovak affair; meanwhile, TAL 2025 can safely be classed as an event with international impact. In the past five years, the share of international participants has grown; besides the directors and managers of companies in Czechia, Slovakia and Poland, we also see managers and teams from corporate headquarters responsible for the global orientation of IT and PC&L (Production Control & Logistics).

The Trends in Automotive Logistics conference has over time earned a firm spot on the calendars of industry journalists and influencers from both Czechia and Germany – and for professionals from our field, it has become an event they simply can’t afford to miss. 

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