It is no longer the time of scientists and engineers; now is the time of business leaders, and if you do not seize the opportunity that artificial intelligence offers now, in ten years you will realize that you were cowards and missed it, said Mislav Malenica, founder and director of the AI startup Mindsmiths, this summer in front of a packed hall at Lider’s conference ‘Marketing and Sales by Numbers’, intriguing the audience with his directness. We sat down with Malenica, a former scientist and engineer, to elaborate on the direction he sees for the development of artificial intelligence in the world and Croatia, and at what stage his Mindsmiths, a startup for developing AI communication agents, is, which recorded 927 thousand euros in revenue and an EBITDA of 152 thousand euros in 2023. We caught him in Zagreb only recently as he spends a lot of time on business trips to the United States, specifically Miami, where he is trying to scale Mindsmiths. He also reflected on his departure from the head of the Croatian Association for Artificial Intelligence CroAI earlier this year, five years after founding it, realizing that, as he says, it was time to step back.
At the Lider conference, you stated that those who are now dealing with generative artificial intelligence are at least five years behind, and those who are now talking about data collection are 30 years behind. Why?
– It mostly depends on how ambitious you are. Namely, I am interested in where the market leaders are. If you want to step out, leave the competition behind, impose yourself, or fight for some market position, what should you be dealing with? Cool companies started dealing with generative artificial intelligence three to five years ago. At that time, we all somehow realized that this was something coming. I understand that most companies cannot be market leaders, and maybe they do not need to, but the message is: if you have ambition, do not play a game that has already been lost.
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You also believe that the era of scientists ended fifteen years ago, the era of engineers ended a few years ago, and now is the era of design and business models. Can you explain this with a concrete example?
– Fifteen years ago, artificial intelligence was not important to almost anyone except us in science. The technology was not advanced enough, and computers were not powerful enough for AI to touch people’s lives, consumers, and customers in a way that was relevant enough for someone in business to recognize. At one point, these algorithms became good enough, and then engineers turned theory into tools and unlocked some new possibilities. This is something we have been doing for the last ten years, and now there are many tools on the market. At this moment, there are not many business leaders who understand the opportunity. When they talk about AI, they talk about something foreign, distant, about some holograms that synthesize voice, and that is a very superficial view of the topic. Real business leaders at this moment understand how they can create more value for their users with the help of artificial intelligence and touch their lives in the right way. In this, often even engineers cannot help because they think more about how something works and less about why it makes sense. Today, you do not need a scientist or an engineer to create Spotify, Facebook, or Netflix. You need a deep understanding of human nature and the direction in which the world is going, and the design of a business model that will go in that same direction.
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