ASPIRE’s 11th annual conference, Man vs Machine, ran on 22–23 September 2026 at Stara Zajezdnia and the Museum of Engineering and Technology in Kraków: two days, five stages, over 30 sessions and more than 500 delegates from across the tech and GBS ecosystem.
Each session left one takeaway: what we should be working on over the next 6–12 months. Four of them:
Advantage Is Local. Name the hard-to-copy strengths of our centres and our city, and put them at the centre of strategy. Keep reviewing where the line between human and machine work sits as the technology moves. (Przemek Roth and Andrew Hallam, ASPIRE)
Meeting the Moment: From City to Region? Start acting as one region. Put a shared agenda on talent and connectivity to the five cities of southern Poland, and test it against the decisions companies make on where to invest and hire. (Przemek Roth, ASPIRE)
Upskilling. Redesign growth, reward and meaning for roles that are being automated, and move every centre from deploying people to developing them. (Gerard Vries, HEINEKEN Global Shared Services, and Edesio Santana, SSON)
No Safe Ground. Make the decisions this transformation needs now, with the information we have. Each centre leader commits to one brave move in the next twelve months and reports back at ASPIRE 2027. (Stéphane Bernard, Euroclear)
On the Interactive Wall, delegates finished two sentences. My hope for AI in Kraków is… “We drive, not watch.” My worry about AI in Kraków is… “We surrender to the machine.”
We meet again at ASPIRE 2027.
Takeaways, slides and photos on the Man vs Machine 2026 site ↗
