AmCham General Assembly 2021 Report

Contents:

Board of Directors for the period 2021-2022

Violeta Luca of Microsoft and Oliver Stucky of Honeywell will join an AmCham Board led by Michal Chour of the Alcron Hotel Prague, Milan Šlapák of GE Aviation, Michal Nebeský of Citibank, and Sanjiv Suri of Zátiší Group.

Innovative workforce

Innovative workforce is the most important issue this country will be facing in the next years. Continuous improvement makes incremental changes in country’s competitiveness in the short term. Innovation is what brings substantive, major changes to the economy and is what builds lasting competitive advantage. The question is how much innovation do you need and what does it mean to be innovative. Our HR Committee Lead and Board member Rebecca Grattan of Avast, Board member Ondřej Krajíček of Y Soft Corporation, AmCham Vice-President Sanjiv Suri of Zátiší Group, and Kryštof Radek of Johnson & Johnson shared their company approach. 

Key factors for the recovery of Czechia

How the Czech Republic will recover from the pandemic depends on how many moving parts work together. During our General Assembly session, members of the AmCham Board presented major factors that will influence businesses and recovery of the economy. Our Board members outlined the best and worse case scenarios in the areas of macroeconomics (AmCham Vice-President Michal Nebeský on inflation, Board member Josef Kotrba on debt), labor market (Board member Jaroslava Rezlerová on workforce and talent shortage, Board member Michel Perret on immigration and other factors), digitization of the Czech economy (Board member Violeta Luca on digital skills, Board member Oliver Stucky of Honeywell on digital warehouse and Brno potential), Prague tourism (AmCham President Michal Chour of Alcron Hotel Prague), Prague downtown hospitality (Vice-President Sanjiv Suri of Zátiší Group), R&D expenditures (Vice-President Milan Šlapák of GE Aviation), and housing (Blanka Vačkova of JLL).

Discussion with Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Industry and Trade and Minister of Transport Karel Havlíček

Members of AmCham Board of Directors asked Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and Vice-PM Minister of Industry and Trade, Minister of Transport Karel Havlíček questions related to key factors for recovery of the Czech economy, what is the government’s outlook and how the government can embrace the factors. Moderated by Michal Nebeský of Citibank, AmCham Vice-President. Q&A session led by Michal Chour of Alcron Hotel Prague, AmCham President, and Weston Stacey, Executive Director.

Digitizing Czechia

Government representatives and AmCham experts discussed how the pandemic served as the necessity that forced both government and companies to invent new and better ways to work - and how digitization was a primary tool in that reconstruction. In cooperation with the Institute for Politics and Society, with our guests Minister of Health Adam Vojtěch, Chief Digtial Officer at the Health Ministry Martin Zeman, MEP Ondřej Kovařík, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Petr Očko, Head of Department for Digitization Petr Filipi, Chief Digital Officer of the Czech Government Vladimír Dzurilla, and Bob Kartous of Prague Innovation Institute, we covered the waterfront on digitization: from healthcare (Tomáš Březina of Amgen, Martin Koníř of KPMG) to digital skills, office and government (Lenka Axlerová of Microsoft) to 5G (Petr Dvořák of Vodafone) to cloud computing (Board member Michal Stachník of Cisco) to manufacturing (Petr Knap of EY) to education (Jana Břeská of Amazon Web Services). Much has been done and much more needs to be done.