October brought the GS1 community together from across Europe for the much-anticipated Regional Forum! This year, Austria rolled out a warm welcome for three action-packed days featuring over 45 dynamic sessions, the exciting debut of a new presentation style, Pecha Kucha, and an impressive turnout of 602 GS1 colleagues, with 380 attending in person and 218 joining online from 57 different countries.

A special word of gratitude to the GS1 Austria team for the way they welcomed us over the three days and helped us to organise an event from which many good ideas and countless partnerships and collaborations emerged, all of which will undoubtedly help to take GS1 further and higher as a united bloc, setting the standards for the paths of the future.

In the opening plenary session, GS1 in Europe Chair Jan Somers kicked off by revealing the priorities and plans for 2025, emphasising 4 key ambitions: to support the industry in the transition to the circular economy; to help companies make the shift to next generation barcodes; to be a trusted partner for the industry; and to maintain a robust collaboration platform.

Then, the rest of the GS1 in Europe leadership – Elif Müftüoglu and Gregor Herzog – spoke about the pillars that guide GS1’s action: Circular Economy, Traceability and Transparency, Data.

In this plenary session we also heard from industry. Alexander Weissmann, EMA Lead Sustainable Supply Chain at KPMG, spoke about sustainable supply chains and helped us understand how, in a global trade model, we can navigate through global requirements.

Next generation barcodes are already a reality. In this session, we learnt about some examples of implementation and usage of this system from those who have already implemented it.

But first, Francesca Poggiali, addressed the side of the regulators, their great complexity, and how GS1 is connecting with them.

On the industry side, we heard the case of Bottlebooks, with Thomas Ungrad, Sales Manager, and Bernhard Gschwantner, Lead Software Architect, in this product management software company specialised in wine, a sector where new products are appearing at a dizzying rhythm and where GS1 standards are important for managing the huge amount of data.

This session was organised by Senne Van der Bergh, IT Director at GS1 Belgium & Luxemburg, who focused on how we can use AI at GS1 in various ways.

The session began with a lecture by Vincent Nys, Head of Ai & Innovation at Keyrus, who presented the origins and basics of how this mechanism works, how it can create something new, and not just synthesise information. And he left us with a phrase to reflect on: AI is only as good as the data we put into it.

We then had presentations from four MOs. GS1 Germany spoke about governance in AI. GS1 France focussed on the uses of AI in Marketing. GS1 Switzerland presented a GPC prediction tool.  GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg presented its multimodal model.

In this session, we heard about the vision and value growth strategy for the period 2025-2030. Renaud de Barbuat, CEO of Global Office, explained that the focus is on accelerating business value creation for the industries we serve, while securing GS1’s relevance and capabilities and establishing a viable business model for GS1. At the very centre of all this is Trust.

For the second part of the session, Renaud de Barbuat provided conversation moments with members of the Global Office and from Europe to discuss the main pillars: Vision (with Stephanie van Rossum and Jan Somers), Opportunities (with Robert Beideman and Didier Veloso) and Transformation of GS1 (Romanie Dendooven and Elzbieta Halas).

At the last session of the week, we listened to testimonies from industry.

Rembrandt Koppelaar, Director of Research and Innovation at Eco-Wise, has spent the last three years working on a project called Circ Thread – involving more than 30 organisations – to understand how we can build a product information management system for the Circular Economy throughout the product life cycle.

Anna Zießow, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Recyda, presented her company, which has developed Software for Packaging Sustainability Management, which assesses costs and sustainability criteria through automated data flows.