On September 17, Infinum co-hosted the AI-Driven Marketing Summit CEE at Zagreb’s Esplanade Hotel with Adobe and Cyber64. Senior leaders from across Central and Eastern Europe came together to answer: what is AI actually doing inside real businesses?
Last Wednesday, we co-hosted the AI-Driven Marketing Summit CEE at the Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb – a closed executive event that brought together senior marketing, digital, and technology leaders from across Central and Eastern Europe.
Alongside our co-hosts from Adobe and Cyber64, we built an agenda around a simple premise: not what AI could theoretically do, but what it’s actually doing inside real businesses right now.
A day designed to skip the hype
The room heard from a strong lineup.
Hartmut König, CTO Central Europe at Adobe, laid out how AI is reshaping marketing as a discipline. Michał Bochnacki and Tomasz Fryc from Alior Bank showed what personalization at scale looks like when it moves from pilot to production.
Luka Mujkić from Allianz Croatia and Viktor Lazar from Cyber64 walked through how they automated customer journeys with data. The day closed with a panel that asked the one question running beneath everything else: what stays human?
Ana Butara moderated the full day – effortlessly, and in a jacket that read “I hope your email won’t find me.” We hope this recap does.
What it actually takes to stay on-brand
Luka Perić, Principal Designer and Team Lead at Infinum, took the stage with a title that earned its place: What Does It Actually Take to Stay On-Brand? His answer was built on three examples from Infinum’s own marketing & design teams.
Custom illustrations that used to take eight hours now take around two. Marketing page design that previously ran ten to twelve hours now comes in at two to three. A client prototype was delivered in 48 hours. The numbers are clean and the point lands immediately: creative teams can now get significant time back, across the creative work that matters.
But Luka spent just as much time on the condition that makes those numbers possible.
The skill isn’t in prompting. It’s in knowing when the output isn’t there yet. That judgment doesn’t come from the tool.Luka Perić
Principal Designer and Team Lead, Infinum
AI doesn’t replace the creative process – it accelerates the work of people who already know what good looks like. Without taste, without consistent brand standards, and without a critical eye reviewing every output, what you get is what the industry is increasingly calling AI slop: technically generated, visually undistinctive, immediately forgettable.
“Speed is the reward for standards that were built long before the tools arrived,” – concluded Perić.
Marketing in the age of AI: what changes, what stays human
The closing panel brought together Zrinka Lepan, Marketing Director at Infinum, Ivana Josipović of Cyber64, and Yana Bilas from Adobe for a conversation that was as much about team dynamics as technology.
Three questions kept surfacing: what has AI actually changed about the work, what’s it doing to expectations, and where does human judgment remain non-negotiable.
Zrinka opened on how AI shows up in daily practice. The Infinum marketing team uses it across all kinds of day-to-day operational work. “We use AI across everything – content and design production, but also operational work: reports, briefs, the day-to-day,” she said.
On expectations, she was candid in a way that landed well in the room.
Whether I like it or not, my expectations have gotten bigger too – and I sometimes fall into the trap of expecting quicker results and more production in less time. There is a but: since everything is being hyper-produced, the market is getting saturated with the same content. I want my team to stand out with quality.ZRINKA LEPAN
MARKETING DIRECTOR, INFINUM
She pushed back on one of the most common assumptions about AI in marketing: that it creates more time. It doesn’t.
“AI is fast at producing options. Great marketers are irreplaceable at judging which ones actually fit – and that only comes from real experience and expertise. The time is simply redistributed. AI frees up execution time so we can spend it on judgment instead.”
The result, she added, is that people aren’t doing less work. They’re doing more.
On what AI is doing to jobs, she was equally direct. “AI is definitely changing jobs, and in some way it’s changing the definition of a good employee. You can be the best of the best, but if you’re not keeping up with how things are evolving, you can’t use your best qualities in the most efficient way – you can’t use all of your potential fully.”
Her answer to the panel’s final question was the most quotable line of the day.
Does AI scare me? Yes. Do I think we can do without it? No. Do I think it can replace humans completely? Absolutely not. But do I think that people who are good at their job can be even better by using it? Definitely yes.ZRINKA LEPAN
MARKETING DIRECTOR, INFINUM
Asked what she’d never fully hand to AI, she answered in one word: Trust.
And when asked to finish the sentence AI in marketing is… – she didn’t hesitate: inevitable.
