Transforming Customer Engagement: How Infobip Is Building an AI-first Future Through Intelligent Communications

Silvio Kutić, Founder & CEO, Infobip in conversation with Krishna Baidya, Senior Director, Frost & Sullivan

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Building the Foundation for Transformational Growth

Krishna Baidya: Silvio, congratulations on Infobip’s remarkable journey. 20 years is an incredible milestone. Looking back, how did the company begin, and what have been some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned along the way?

Silvio Kutić:  The company was officially founded in 2006, and from the very beginning, we have remained focused on one mission: building the future of digital interactions between businesses, people, and their end users through innovation. Before founding the company, we worked on multiple projects in the communications space, and every one of them failed.

Those years taught us some of the most valuable lessons we have learned. Every failure helped us understand the market better, improve the product, and eventually find a business model that could scale. We kept simplifying the solution, looking for product-market fit, and learning from every iteration until we built the first version of what became Infobip.

At that time, sending something as simple as an SMS was surprisingly complicated because of fragmented mobile networks, different operators, and different protocols. We saw an opportunity to simplify that complexity and built an SMS platform that solved a real customer problem.

As technology evolved, we continued evolving our technology stack, our organization, and the way we innovated.  One thing that has never changed is our willingness to learn. Looking back, I now realize that what we called failures were actually pivots. Every project brought us closer to the right solution.

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Nurturing Growth Agility Through Continuous Learning

Krishna Baidya: You started in a small town and have since built Infobip into a global, multi-billion-dollar company and a leader in the communications space. Looking back, what inspired that journey, and what enabled you to scale the business from such humble beginnings? Many entrepreneurs give up after repeated setbacks. What kept you moving forward, and how has that shaped the culture at Infobip today?

Silvio Kutić:  I always wanted to build something of my own. Even when the projects weren’t succeeding, I genuinely enjoyed what I was doing.

We started in a very small town where tourism was the primary industry. Building a global technology company from that environment wasn’t easy. But I was always drawn to technology and engineering. My father was an engineer, and my mother worked in education, and those influences shaped how I approached building the company. We focused on engineering, continuous learning, and creating opportunities for people who shared the right mindset.

Rather than hiring only experienced professionals, we invested in developing talent ourselves. We created an environment where people could learn together, share knowledge, collaborate, and continuously build new skills.

I believe that has become one of our greatest strengths. The most valuable capability any company can develop is the ability to innovate, the ability to learn, and the ability to adapt to new technologies and new knowledge. Those capabilities have helped us navigate every stage of our growth.

Another lesson I have learned is that leaders need to enjoy the journey. Technology changes constantly. Markets evolve. Products evolve. But if you enjoy building, learning, and solving problems with people you trust, then every challenge becomes another opportunity to grow.

Maximizing Innovation with Community Impact

Krishna Baidya: The numbers speak for themselves; but what often gets overlooked is the impact you’ve had on the community where it all began. Could you talk about why investing in local talent, education, and community development has remained such an important part of Infobip’s journey?

Silvio Kutić:  From the beginning, we built the company around three ideas.

• The first was building the future of digital interactions through breakthrough innovation.
• The second was education and knowledge sharing. We believe knowledge creates opportunities for people. When individuals join Infobip, we want them to develop new skills, grow professionally, and create new possibilities for themselves.
• The third was creating a positive impact on the communities around us. We have always supported hospitals, educational initiatives, STEM programs, robotics, universities, and young talents because we believe innovation should extend beyond the company itself.

Several years ago, we established the Infobip Foundation to further strengthen these efforts. Through the Foundation, we continue supporting young people, promoting education, and helping individuals create new life opportunities through knowledge. For us, innovation has never been limited to products. It also means investing in people and helping communities grow alongside the company.

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Capitalizing on Megatrends Driving CX Transformation

Krishna Baidya: I am sure your journey has inspired many entrepreneurs and business leaders, especially those starting with limited resources. It’s encouraging to see how Infobip is helping create similar opportunities through education, skill development, and partnerships with universities. Now, I’d like to shift gears and talk about the industry itself. For many of our readers and viewers who may not come from the ICT sector, could you introduce Infobip and explain what the company does?

Silvio Kutić:  Infobip is a global communications platform that helps businesses engage with their customers across virtually every communication channel, whether that’s SMS, WhatsApp, email, RCS (rich communication services), voice, or many others.

Customers can use our complete technology stack or integrate individual capabilities into their existing environments. That flexibility has always been important because every organization has different requirements.

Today, almost 75% of the global population has interacted with services delivered through the Infobip platform on behalf of our customers. Last year alone, that represented nearly 700 billion interactions.

The communications industry itself has evolved significantly during this period. The Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) industry has, I would say, evolved through three major phases of growth.

• The first phase focused primarily on traditional telecommunications services such as SMS and voice.
• The second phase introduced omnichannel communications. As of today, WhatsApp has become one of the most widely used communication channels globally, but there are also platforms such as Viber and Line, particularly across Asia, as well as Google RCS, email, video, and other over-the-top (OTT) communication channels.

Today, we are entering what we describe as the third phase. Instead of simply offering multiple channels, organizations are orchestrating all those channels intelligently. AI is determining where customers prefer to communicate, when they should be contacted, what message is most relevant, and how content should be personalized in real time. We are moving from simple communication channels to intelligent, orchestrated customer engagement. The objective is to make every interaction more relevant, more personalized, and ultimately more valuable for both businesses and their customers.

Building Unified Customer Engagement Ecosystems

Krishna Baidya: As the industry has evolved, it sounds like your conversations with customers have evolved as well. Earlier, you may have worked primarily with IT or telecom teams. Today, are you engaging with a much broader set of stakeholders across marketing, sales, customer experience, and digital leadership? How has that changed the way you work with organizations?

Silvio Kutić:  Absolutely. In the past, we typically worked with IT teams, telecom specialists, or security departments. Today, the discussion is much broader. We are increasingly working with Chief Digital Officers and leaders responsible for the entire customer journey because AI is bringing together capabilities that were previously managed separately.

Organizations once relied on different platforms for customer support, marketing, customer success, sales, and contact centers. Now those capabilities are beginning to converge. Instead of multiple disconnected applications, organizations are moving toward AI-enabled communication platforms with a single customer view, shared analytics, and connected workflows.

AI can understand signals, determine the right moment to communicate, personalize the interaction, and seamlessly involve human experts whenever necessary. Rather than managing fragmented technologies, organizations can focus on the complete customer journey. That’s where we see the greatest transformation taking place.

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Strengthening Competitive Advantage Through an AI-first Strategy

Krishna Baidya: AI is clearly reshaping the competitive landscape, with companies from different parts of the ecosystem converging around a common goal of delivering more intelligent customer engagement. Against that backdrop, how is Infobip approaching an AI-first strategy? What does becoming AI-first mean for your organization, and how does that ultimately help your customers innovate and create more value for theirs?

Silvio Kutić:  We believe AI represents one of the biggest technology shifts we have seen, and we want to be at the forefront of that transformation. For us, becoming AI-first is not simply about adding AI features to existing products. It’s about rethinking how we build software, how our teams work, our go-to-market strategy, and how we create value for customers.

We’ve organized hackathons and encouraged employees across the company to experiment with new ideas because we believe innovation happens when people are given the freedom to learn and test new approaches. Rather than having people tied to individual software applications, we’re designing workflows where AI agents can operate seamlessly across different functions and organizational units. That’s really the direction we need to move in.

If you can speed up one part of the organization by 5X or 10X, the rest of the organization also needs to move at that pace because your competitors are already operating at 10X—or even beyond—in many areas. We are also working closely with leading AI companies and technologies because we recognize that this ecosystem is evolving very quickly. The pace of innovation is extraordinary, and companies need to remain agile if they want to stay ahead.

Enabling Innovative Business Models Through Agentic AI

Krishna Baidya: One of the things we keep hearing is that AI is making everyone a builder. It’s becoming much easier to experiment, develop proof of concepts, and scale successful ideas much faster than before. How is Infobip helping customers take advantage of that? And perhaps you could also tell us a little about AgentOS and the role it’s playing in enabling this new way of building.

Silvio Kutić:  For many years, people have interacted directly with applications. Increasingly, we’ll see intelligent agents acting on behalf of users, completing tasks, retrieving information, coordinating activities, and communicating with other systems. That’s a significant change.

With AI, everyone is becoming a builder, enabling organizations to personalize workflows and software around their own business needs rather than relying on one-size-fits-all applications. We are already seeing the first signs of this transformation, and I believe it will fundamentally reshape how businesses interact with customers and how software itself is designed. This is why we have introduced AgentOS.

Our objective is to provide an environment where organizations can build, deploy, and manage intelligent AI agents while integrating them into existing customer engagement workflows. AgentOS is an agentic platform that enables organizations to execute personalized, omnichannel customer interactions while automating actions behind the scenes. As these capabilities mature, software will become increasingly personalized. Rather than every user interacting with the same application in the same way, intelligent agents will adapt experiences based on individual needs, preferences, and objectives.

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Establishing Best Practices for Secure AI Adoption

Krishna Baidya: Because of AI, trust and governance become much more important. We often get excited about everything AI can do, but we don’t always spend enough time discussing how to do it responsibly. What are the conversations you’re having with customers around governance and trust? How do you help organizations move beyond the hype to build AI solutions that are secure, reliable, and deployed with the right guardrails?

Silvio Kutić:  Trust has always been fundamental to digital communications, and it becomes even more important as AI capabilities continue expanding. While AI can automate many activities, businesses still need appropriate governance, accountability, and oversight. People should understand how decisions are made, when AI is involved, and where human intervention remains necessary.

That requires strong guardrails, grounded knowledge, reinforcement learning, continuous monitoring, and the ability to keep humans in the loop, escalating decisions whenever necessary. These capabilities are essential to protect both customers and brand reputation.

I don’t believe organizations should think about AI and governance as separate conversations. They need to evolve together. As agent-to-agent communication becomes more common, it will also become increasingly important to ensure that agents can securely authenticate and trust one another, just as people do today. Establishing trusted frameworks, secure identities, and responsible operating models will become increasingly important for the entire industry. Without trust, organizations will struggle to realize the full potential of AI.

Looking Ahead: Leading The Next Growth Wave of Intelligent CX

Krishna Baidya: Finally, if there is one message you would like business leaders to take away from this conversation, what would it be?

Silvio Kutić:  AI is creating one of the biggest technology transitions we have experienced. Every organization will need to think differently about customer engagement, software development, and digital interactions.

The companies that succeed won’t simply adopt AI. They will rethink how they innovate, how they organize themselves, and how they create value for customers. Technology will continue evolving very quickly, and that means continuous learning will become more important than ever. For us, the journey has always been about learning, adapting, and building.

I believe the future belongs to organizations that embrace that mindset.

Closing Reflection: Thriving Through the Customer Engagement Transformation

Customer engagement is entering a new era where intelligence, personalization, and real-time decision-making are becoming fundamental to every digital interaction. As organizations move beyond traditional omnichannel communications, success will increasingly depend on their ability to connect data, AI, and customer context into seamless, adaptive experiences.

For Infobip, this transformation extends beyond technology. As Silvio Kutić emphasized throughout the discussion, becoming AI-first requires organizations to continuously reinvent themselves, foster a culture of learning, and rethink how software is designed and delivered. The opportunity lies in creating intelligent customer engagement platforms that anticipate needs, personalize every interaction, and build lasting customer relationships.

As AI continues to reshape digital communications, the organizations that thrive will be those that embrace continuous innovation, remain open to change, and build trusted, intelligent experiences that place customers at the center of every interaction.

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