Esophageal cancerThe foundation of modern surgery of the upper gastrointestinal tract was defined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by surgical giants, such as Billroth, Lewis, Roux, Allison, Nissen, Toupet, Lortat-Jacob, and many others. These fundamental principles continue to form the DNA of our daily surgical work and the framework for evolution for our field. However, the system of coordinates laid down by the founding fathers of surgery requires constant adaptation and renewal. Since the 1980s, the introduction of minimally invasive procedures. Minimally invasive procedures have been the main driver of innovation. Consequently, laparoscopy has established itself as the accepted standard for many operations of the upper gastrointestinal tract. Almost two decades have passed since the last edition of this publication. Since that time, our entire lives—and thus also the way we work, learn, inform, and educate ourselves as surgeons—have changed radically in an unprecedented way. Modern surgery has been catapulted into the age of digitalization and mechanization in a short period. For upper gastrointestinal surgeons, this led to the introduction of robotics and imminent application of artificial intelligence to our operations, training opportunities, and digital learning. The challenges associated with these developments result from unregulated offers and content available online for our colleagues and our patients. The ethical dilemmas that are arising for us and our work with the introduction of artificial intelligence have not yet been thoroughly thought through, and it remains unclear whether we are really ready for this new era with our current “analog age” ethics. What impact these epochal developments will have on our work as surgeons cannot really be predicted today; what is certain is that the effects will amount to a revolution, and textbooks such as this one will have to be adapted accordingly. In the current edition of the atlas, we have implemented a thoughtful, forward-thinking approach to account and anticipate for the transformation described above. For example, we have provided a particularly broad scope to the description of robot-assisted procedures and have recruited proven experts for the corresponding articles. However, open surgery and conventional laparoscopic surgical techniques remain core part of our work and warrant equal level of attention in this publication. Another important and particularly innovative step toward multimedia digitization are the surgical videos that are now integrated into many chapters and can be accessed online via QR code. These videos, curated by experts and embedded in the atlas, close an important quality gap and also significantly improve the didactic value of this work, which can be accessed online via QR code. We thank the editors and the publisher for the opportunity to take the “Atlas for Hepatobiliary and Upper-GI Surgery” into a new era and are sure that this important textbook will retain and even expand its place as a standard work.