At the 10th Annual ACAP Conference in Seattle, Infinum CEO Nikola Kapraljević joined leaders from technology, healthcare, telecommunications, and robotics for a discussion on how AI is changing their industries, drawing on Infinum’s experience with its own AI transformation.
The Association of Croatian American Professionals (ACAP) is a non-profit organization that brings Croatian-American professionals from the U.S. and around the world together to exchange ideas, build business connections, and celebrate the cultural heritage they share.
As a Croatian company growing in the U.S., with teams on both sides of the Atlantic, supporting the conference was a great way to connect with a community that shares our roots and ambitions.
Just as importantly, it was an opportunity to share the perspective of a tech company that has gone through its own AI transformation and is now helping others navigate theirs – while hearing how the same shift is playing out in other industries.
A decade of building the Croatian professional community
ACAP connects 2,500 Croatian-American professionals across industries and academic communities.
Founded in 2014, the organization marked its tenth conference with its first gathering in the Pacific Northwest. This year’s theme, Croatian Excellence: Celebrating the Decade, Engineering the Century, highlighted Croatian know-how and global business practices, including what it takes to do business in the U.S.
We skipped the theory and focused on AI adoption in practice
The conference program opened with welcome remarks from Conference Chair Vedran Brozović and ACAP President Nikola Metes. The main stage then turned to a topic on everyone’s mind: how has AI changed the daily work of engineers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals over the past two years?
Our CEO, Nikola Kapraljević, joined the panel discussion titled The AI Disruption Across Industries: What Actually Changed, and What It Means for Your Work, together with Josip Ćesić, Co-Founder & CEO of Gideon; Mijo Soldin, Vice President of Telecom Strategy & Partnerships at Infobip; and Marija Tadin-Strapps, Head of Discovery Network at Pfizer. The conversation was moderated by Tomislav Tipurić, Chief Technology Officer at Nepho.
How we transformed Infinum around AI
Nikola talked about how enterprise AI adoption is still far from where the headlines suggest.
Everyone is buying AI tools, everyone is prompting, but very few enterprises have actually transformed their organization around AI. The companies that get real value from AI didn’t get there by buying software licenses and hoping adoption follows.
NIKOLA KAPRALJEVIĆ, CEO, INFINUM
Describing Infinum’s own transformation, Nikola said it was probably easier for us as a tech company, and that he can only imagine how hard it is for non-tech enterprises.
Over the last two years, we’ve restructured our teams, introduced AI-native ways of working, and trained 90% of our engineers through structured sprints.
That kind of transformation requires uncomfortable conversations, unpopular calls, and working through resistance.
But the experience also gave us something we could take beyond our own organization: a structured AI transformation program that we’ve since run with organizations across financial services, telecom, and logistics.
The conversation moved from the stage to the dinner table
After the last panel, we joined the cocktail hour and explored two exhibitions: one on Croatian Americans in the U.S. Armed Forces and another on Croatian heritage in the Pacific Northwest. Industry dinners followed, giving us a chance to continue the conversations in a more casual setting.
The rest of the weekend kept the same pace. Saturday brought the gala dinner and awards ceremony, the ACAP Foundation fundraiser, and a silent auction. CroatiaFest closed things out on Sunday.
We look forward to future editions and to continuing the conversations that started in Seattle.