Letterpress 2.0: How to Win the Race for Adaptation in the Era of Polycrisis and AI
History does not repeat itself. But it has a weakness for rhymes. Letterpress once dramatically reduced the cost of spreading information, accelerated innovation, and reshaped Europe’s economic map. At the same time, it poured gasoline on social conflict: more voices did not automatically mean more consensus. Today, we stand at a similar inflection point. Generative AI is the “letterpress” of our generation—arriving in an era of polycrisis. Demographic pressures are tightening labor markets, geopolitics is rewriting trade routes, and polarization is eroding our ability to agree on change.
In Europe, we often fixate on lagging behind in building the largest language models. But economic victories are not decided in laboratories; they are decided in operations—in who can translate technology quickly and intelligently into productivity, quality, and resilience. This is a crucial message for logistics. Logistics is the nervous system of the economy, and it is here that we will first see who treats adaptation as a core discipline and who reduces it to a one-off IT project.
The presentation will show why, in a world that is hard to predict, the primary tool is no longer “better forecasting” but resilience: scenario thinking, rapid learning, strategic decision-making under uncertainty, and the ability to uncover internal weaknesses before a crisis does. “Back to the human” does not mean nostalgia for paper; it means upgrading the human—cultivating a growth mindset, learning from failure, building new capabilities, and practicing leadership that can steer organizations in a constant state of change.
The conclusion is optimistic, but not naïve: the Czech economy has exceptional industrial and engineering breadth—we can “make almost anything.” Our opportunity is not to win the race for the largest model. Our opportunity is to win the race for the fastest and deepest adaptation. To technologies, megatrends, and risks, we must respond by strengthening the human.