Infobip Must Keep Reinventing Itself

Infobip’s first twenty years cannot be reduced to a single turning point. The company started in Vodnjan, quickly moved beyond local boundaries, built a global presence, and developed its own communications technology. Yet Izabel Jelenić, CTO of Infobip, says its progress cannot be explained by one event or one business decision. It has been a continuous process of change, in which part of the business model, technology or organisation had to be rebuilt every few years.

“There is no one thing. Every year or two, you have to change something, invent something and build something in order to survive for twenty years,” Jelenić tells ICTbusiness Media – ICTbusiness.info & ICTbusiness TV. The anniversary, he says, is a rare opportunity to look back because daily work usually focuses on the next challenge rather than the company’s own history. That is why he also connects the anniversary with Shift, which marks another phase of transformation for Infobip.

In the early years, the key decisions were to move beyond Croatia, sell in neighbouring markets, and build technical solutions for telecom operators. Some of those solutions could not be bought because the market did not yet offer ready-made platforms for what Infobip wanted to do. The company therefore built its own technology and sales channels, while also having to earn the trust of large customers. Jelenić notes that typical clients were telecom operators and enterprises such as banks, where personal contact mattered greatly.

Global presence was not created only from Croatia. Infobip sent people into the markets where it wanted to operate, opened sales offices and built local relationships. In the pioneering period, that meant very practical decisions: someone would go to Kuala Lumpur, meet people, open an office, hire a team and start building business. “There were many such decisions and events in those pioneering times that brought us to where we are today,” Jelenić says.

Shift entered that story as a way for Infobip to reach a community that had not originally been at the centre of its business. Historically, the company was oriented towards enterprise users, while developers, startups and smaller technology companies often knew competing tools better. Jelenić says it therefore became important to create an event that was not only a business instrument, but also a way of giving back to the community from which Infobip emerged. Shift brings together the technology scene and offers content for developers, while enabling people and companies to meet in person.

The latest transformation is driven by artificial intelligence. Jelenić believes the moment is important because it is now clear that AI is not a passing fad and cannot be avoided. It is not enough, he says, for employees to use generative tools through a simple interface and occasionally ask for advice. If a company wants to become AI-first, AI must be addressed at the infrastructure level and embedded into the way work is organised.

In that vision, every employee may eventually have several specialised agents performing tasks, while the person coordinates their work like a small team lead. Infobip is already developing internal tools that allow employees to create agents, use them and connect them to the company’s shared knowledge. These agents should not depend on whether a user’s laptop is switched on. They should be able to take a task, work in the background, and use organisational memory and context.

AgentOS builds on that internal direction for the external market. Jelenić describes it as a continuation of the move from communication channels to the orchestration of agents that can work with people and communicate through existing channels. In other words, Infobip is no longer building only technology for sending messages. It is building a layer that should help companies organise communication between customers, employees and AI agents.

In the future, Jelenić expects the need for communication to grow. As the number of agents increases, so will the need for them to communicate with people, business systems and one another. Infobip sees itself as a platform connecting agents, businesses and people. Twenty years after its founding, that is not a departure from the original idea, but its continuation: software creating value through communication, now in an environment where the participants are increasingly not only people and applications, but autonomous agents as well.