On 14 May 2019 the Conference "Lifts and Escalators in a Digital World" promoted and organized by the European Lift Association (ELA) in the framework of the activities related to the General Assembly 2019 of the Association was held in London.

Important speakers have spoken following the opening of the event by the President of ELA, Roberto Zappa, and the greetings of Zhang Lexiang, Secretary General of the China Elevator Association (CEA).

A general message: we are living in times of great revolution where many factors affecting our industry are changing fast and so are the expectations of the users and for the industrial productions. It's really important to observe also how the economic growth depends on Digital.

A lot of questions: how digitalization changes the world. What is meant by digitalization…? What are the main considerations when discussing it?

Two work sessions in which this phenomenon has also been investigated in specific sectors evaluating, for example, the implications of the digitalization in the building sector (the value of the innovative approach to predictive maintenance that starts from the lift and involves the whole building – the smart readiness “SRI” for buildings).

The themes of how to digitalize the existing lifts (so that they are increasingly consistent with the concept of smart building) and how the lift books will have to evolve due to the digital era have been explored in depth.

From the issues of traceability and safety of components the interest of the audience moved to those related to artificial intelligence. Last but not least: what role the digitalization revolution will play in this process of general transformation and what skills will the workers of the new digitalized world need to have.

Finally, it has been “shed a bit of light” on the implications of Brexit for the elevator industry.

At the end of the event, very positive comments were collected from the participants about the contents of the presentations and the organizational modalities.