Croatian Entrepreneur Matija Žulj from Davos: There Is Much Discussion About How Many Jobs AI Will Create

Although relatively small, the Swiss town of Davos becomes an important gathering place for numerous heads of states and governments, politicians, and businesspeople once a year for a few days. This week is no different, as nearly three thousand participants at the World Economic Forum are listening to and discussing global economic and geopolitical challenges.

Among the well-known political and economic names participating are, for example, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Chinese Premier Li Qiang, while Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković also attended the forum. However, although the names of Croatians are not often seen on the list of participants in numerous panel discussions, this year, in the discussion on the hot topic of artificial intelligence for socially responsible and sustainable innovations, Matija Žulj, founder and director of Agrivi, which focuses on the digitalization of agriculture, contributed.

He is one of the few, if not the first Croatian entrepreneur to participate in a discussion at this largest global economic gathering. The panel held this morning discussed the collaboration of corporations and entrepreneurs with socially responsible innovations for faster scaling of positive impact, or achieving socially responsible goals of the United Nations. Alongside Žulj, the discussion featured Ranveer Chandra, Chief Technology Officer of Agri-Food at Microsoft, Julia White, Chief Marketing Officer and member of the Executive Board at SAP, while the conversation was moderated by Jean-Philippe Courtois, Executive Vice President of Microsoft.

– Agrivi is part of Microsoft’s ‘Leadership for Positive Impact’ program, and on the panel, we shared our successful collaboration experiences that helped us launch a new product to the market – an AI agronomic advisor. Most small and medium-sized farmers globally do not have access to agronomic advice, partly due to financial reasons and partly because there are not enough agronomic experts who could provide advice to all the farmers, of which there are over 500 million in the world. With our AI agronomic advisor, which we deliver with partners and key stakeholders in the food industry, we enable simple and free access to advice for them, thus democratizing agriculture – explained Žulj.

Focus on the Development of Artificial Intelligence

In Davos, Žulj had the opportunity to meet numerous business partners, and he found it interesting to hear current topics, views, and reflections from various industry stakeholders. As expected, the topic of artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, known as GPT, strongly dominates the lectures and panels, but also the breaks in between.

– The topics in the field of artificial intelligence were diverse – on one side, opportunities were discussed, and on the other, risks that need to be addressed. Most leaders see this moment as the most exciting technological development since the inception of the internet. The greatest historical invention of mankind was the invention of language and the ability to understand and communicate between people, which enabled significant development of civilization. Now we have reached a point in development where artificial intelligence understands language and knows how to communicate better and more accurately with people, and the opportunities that allow large volumes of manual tasks to be done more cost-effectively, qualitatively, and quickly are immense. The biggest challenges for companies are to find additional people they can employ, and the current development opens up exceptional capacity for employing artificial intelligence – explains Žulj, noting that risks also emerge from this.

– There is much discussion about how many existing jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence, where most agree that technological development has historically always created completely new jobs. Here we come to the challenges of educating and qualifying people for those jobs, and we can expect a significant need for retraining and/or additional qualifications of the workforce – adds Žulj.

He also notes that among the participants, there is a strong emphasis on the development of artificial intelligence based on principles of responsibility. Leaders understand that most artificial intelligence algorithms have been trained on data generated by the ‘global north’, male gender, and other socio-demographic characteristics that create a degree of bias. However, Žulj emphasizes that the focus is on ensuring the development of artificial intelligence that will avoid bias on any basis.