Watch: Scania's Johan Lindahl on organisational transformation through digitalisation and AI

Read more: ALSC DS Europe editor's blog

At the ALSC Digital Strategies Europe conference, industry leaders are set to discuss the latest in AI, data integration, and supply chain visibility.

On the second day of the ALSC Digital Strategies Europe 2025 conference, Johan Lindahl, head of digitalisation and AI for Scania Logistics at Scania, delivered a keynote presentation on how Scania is embedding a culture of digitalisation across its logistics operations and took part in a panel discussion on combining digital, data and logistics teams for smarter, faster transformation.

Before the conference drew to a close, Lindahl joined Automotive Logistics on the famous Red Sofa to share more about Scania's digitalisation journey and some of the interesting initiatives and partnerships it has formed along the way.

Organisational transformation

Through some organisational changes and changes to its operating model in early 2025, Scania has transformed its logistics operation "to emphasise and to reinforce shared responsibility and it focus on [its] people".

"I was exposed to what amazing things people can do when they have the right mindset and are equipped with the right tools and with trust," Lindahl said. "Those were really special moments."

He explained that digital strategy is all about giving an answer to important questions, such as how to navigate "constant disruption" when it comes to industry trends, geopolitics and tariffs.

This year, Scania Logistics has made a deliberate effort to organise itself around its capabilities. "We also understood that we needed to be able to adapt and react, and to be relevant over time we needed to be more agile like we've been in the software development and R&D side," Lindahl added.

He said that the company designed an operating model that created capability teams, which it then "empowered with autonomy by making them cross-functional so all resources, all competence needed for that particular delivery stream was put inside that team".

Scania also made the choice to retire its digitalisation team, seeing digitalisation as no longer separate from how the business operates. "We are aiming to be digitally native," Lindahl said.

Watch: ALSC Digital Strategies Europe 2025 Day 2 Wrap up

Christopher Ludwig, chief content officer at Automotive Logistics & Ultima Media provided a summary of ALSC Digital Strategies Europe Day 2.

A new addition to the team

Lindahl also spoke about an important addition to the Scania team in 2025: an EDI AI assistant called EDITH. Unlike linear EDI support from human operators, where cases are limited to around 50 per day and responses can take minutes, EDITH offers instant and unlimited responses – 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 265 days a year.

"EDITH is a good example where we did complete a journey from AI adoption, augmenting our team members (in the sense of democratisation of the role of being an EDI specialist and empowering everyone to the next step), empowering augmenting our team delivery and our stakeholders [by] giving them the access to EDITH, and then finally in April we scaled the API to enable her to be used by all our part suppliers," Lindahl said.

He added that the next step, which Scania is currently working on, is to add agentic features to EDITH. "It's really amazing to see that you can go all the way from personal productivity to a scaled digital solution and also introducing autonomous agent workflows without involving IT for a second."

OpenAI partnership

Over the past year, Scania has been partnering with OpenAI "with the common ambition to push for broad adoption". Lindahl explained that empowering people is at the heart of Scania's AI strategy on an enterprise level, so a key aim of its partnership with OpenAI has revolved around "personal efficiency" and making repetitive tasks more reusable by creating custom GPTs.

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The partnership began with 2,000 licenses and this has already grown significantly, with around 10,000 in use today. On top of this, Scania has an API platform which it can use to scale its AI assets, allowing them to be used by applications, microservices and external parties including its part suppliers.

Lindahl also touched on the application of AI in leadership and to support decision-making. "It's really amazing that you now can, in just a few minutes, gain the knowledge equivalent of a PhD to some extent," he said.

Priorities for 2026

When it comes to digitalisation and AI, Lindahl shared his view that the company is only starting to scratch the surface of what can be achieved with digital technologies. "We're only in the beginning and it's hard to tell what to expect because when this year started I really couldn't imagine all the fantastic things that we have seen not only in logistics, of course, but over the entire enterprise," he said.

Looking ahead to 2026, he claimed that Scania has some "bold ambitions" when it comes to continuing its digitalisation journey, with priorities for next year including improving integration of its delivery streams and achieving AI literacy by the end of the year.