Infobip’s Veselin Vuković on using Copilot to nurture partnerships

Navigating the push and pull of complex corporate partnerships requires the skill to know when to make an aggressive gambit, the situations where a gentle touch is required and the time to understand and strategize how the next step can drive the collaboration to the next level.

That delicate dance is the day-to-day challenge of Veselin Vuković’s job with Croatian AI-first cloud communications platform Infobip, which, as the leading platform for conversational customer experiences, helps global brands create AI-powered interactions that connect, engage and build trust.

Vuković is Infobip’s chief alliances officer, handling partnerships with technology and ISV companies, consulting, solution and services organizations, as well as telecom mobile network operators ranging from local companies to global behemoths.

“It’s one of the key ingredients of the partnership that excites me the most,” he says. “It’s more than a transactional business. It requires a lot of alignment and understanding—not only on business goals but also on culture and the way of doing things.”

Data helps drive many of the decisions Vuković makes daily. As each partner has different needs and goals, he must weigh the information he has at his disposal and determine the best course of action.

“All is centered around, how do we engage with these partners to basically create value for our end customers?” he says. “It’s a challenge to spin all the right wheels in both organizations to make things right and move in the right direction.”

About 18 months ago, Infobip’s 3,500 employees started using Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Vuković notes that the company has embraced “Copilot and other AI tools.”

“My preferred way of doing things or thinking about desired outcomes or decisions is quite data- and fact-driven,” Vuković says. “Copilot is a great tool to help make these decisions faster and more efficient.”

Vuković says that he specifically uses Copilot to help summarize conversations held internally or with partners to help articulate next steps and action items. But he has also begun to use it to help analyze both structured and unstructured data.

“It makes it much easier for me personally and for our organization to come up with a quick analysis and make a decision—cutting analysis time from days to hours, in some cases,” he says.

Vuković also highlights that insights from meetings can flow directly into follow-up emails in Outlook, structured summaries in Word or tasks in Planner, preserving context and eliminating the manual translation of conversations into action.

Infobip also uses Copilot Studio to build and deploy custom agents into Microsoft Teams. The purpose-built AI agents are aligned with specific business processes, ranging from internal knowledge assistants to workflow-driven bots, helping Infobip support its operations without large development efforts.

Vuković sees unlimited potential for Copilot as more organizations, not only in Croatia but also around the world, begin to shape a plan for using technology more effectively.

“The agents and models that are being built are going to help people and businesses operate more efficiently,” he says. “This is the path. We as a company are definitely going in that direction and this in an integral part of our strategy.”

As for advice for other companies considering incorporating Copilot into their process, Vuković says it’s imperative to start slow and then look out to the horizon of what they want Copilot to help them accomplish.

“We need to invest in thinking about, ‘What are the business problems we want to resolve and how can we efficiently resolve those challenges, or just improve productivity and efficiency by using Copilot?’” he says. “Some of that requires internal conversations, mapping existing processes, looking at how things operate now and challenge some of the things that are being done in a certain way. You have to stay curious in that regard.”