The Crisis Narrative Gives Way to Transformation

For several years, the Croatian IT industry often discussed crisis, slowdown, and changing market conditions. Ivan Bešlić of Unit Croatia and co-founder of Sofascore believes the central topic is now different. Instead of crisis, the industry is increasingly talking about transformation brought by artificial intelligence. For him, AI is not a future technology, but a reality already changing how companies work, what clients expect, and how public policy should respond.

“AI has really arrived. It is not the future, but the present,” Bešlić tells ICTbusiness Media – ICTbusiness.info & ICTbusiness TV. Unit Croatia therefore wants to be a place where companies exchange experience from the field, including from markets outside Europe. Members of the association travel, hear practical examples and bring back knowledge that can be shared with the domestic IT sector, the government and other organisations.

One problem is the speed of change. Bešlić warns that policymakers often work with data that is one or two years old. If a change happens in the industry today, it may only become statistically visible later, while legal changes may arrive even later. That is why Unit Croatia wants to communicate early what companies already see on the ground. “We want to communicate a change that is coming faster than ever,” he says.

This also matters for topics such as data centres and infrastructure. Bešlić mentions contacts linked to planned data centres under the Three Seas Initiative, but the broader point is that the industry can provide input based on daily market reality, while institutional systems often move at a slower pace. If policy relies only on delayed statistics, measures may arrive after the market has already shifted again.

At company level, the message is more direct. Bešlić says nobody can afford to ignore AI because competitors will work faster and better. This no longer means simply experimenting with tools, but seriously embedding them into work methods. In his own company, he says, the team changed its way of working before the summer, moving away from an approach widely discussed in the industry for the past fifteen years and adopting a different model suited to faster change.

Alongside changes in methodology, companies are introducing different tools, algorithms and additional software. Bešlić admits they are not yet using the full potential, but the goal is to tune the company so it can move at least as fast as competitors, and preferably faster. He sees speed as an initial advantage: those who adjust processes earlier may hold a better position when the market accelerates further.

An important part of the shift is the lower cost and wider availability of tools. Bešlić does not speak about an abstract future, but about concrete examples from daily work. He mentions an internal tool for ordering food in the company canteen that was developed in a few dozen hours and made financial sense. Under the previous model, such a tool would probably not have been built because it would have been too expensive or taken too long. Today it can be created quickly and immediately improve an operational process.

What is especially notable is that small tools can increasingly be built by people who are not developers. They identify a problem in their own work, use available AI tools and, on the same day, obtain a solution that makes their work easier. Automation is therefore moving down to the level of individual teams and tasks, rather than depending only on large IT projects. Bešlić believes many manual and slow activities will be automated in exactly this way.

That does not mean the human mind becomes less important. On the contrary, Bešlić expects its value to remain in creativity, context and the ability to direct tools. AI will take over work that people previously avoided or could not justify automating, while humans will need to define problems more clearly and make decisions. For the IT industry, this is not a change to wait for. It is already happening, and the question is whether companies, associations, and institutions can adapt quickly enough.