Cover Izabel Jelenić, co-founder and chief technology officer of Infobip
Izabel Jelenić, co-founder and chief technology officer of Infobip
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Izabel Jelenić, co-founder and chief technology officer of Infobip, reflects on two decades of building the invisible infrastructure of human connection—and why the most significant work is still ahead.
The town of Vodnjan sits on the Istrian peninsula in Croatia, population roughly 6,000. It is not the kind of place from which global technology companies typically emerge. But in 2006, two co-founders took out a EUR25,000 loan, set up Infobip, and began building what would become one of the world's most significant communications platforms.
The seed of the idea was a simple one: a Christmas SMS sent from Vodnjan’s town hall to members of its diaspora community. It is, in retrospect, a perfect origin story for a company whose entire purpose has been to power the connections between businesses and the people they serve. “The key lesson is not just growth,” says Jelenić, “but how messaging has become central to how businesses build relationships with customers.”
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Above The town of Vodnjan in Croatia is where Infobip’s story started
The town of Vodnjan in Croatia is where Infobip’s story started
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Building the pipes
The first decade was about infrastructure. Before orchestration, before AI, before omnichannel, there were the pipes. Infobip spent its early years constructing the technical bedrock that enterprise communications would eventually run on: operator connections, SMS delivery architecture, the unglamorous but essential work of making sure a message sent anywhere in the world actually arrived. Today, the platform reaches over seven billion mobile devices across six continents, connected to more than 10,000 connections, of which over 800 are direct operator relationships.
By 2020, Infobip had reached a billion-dollar valuation, becoming the first Croatian unicorn, entirely on the strength of its own revenues and the technical bets its founders were willing to make.
From notifications to dialogue
What Infobip's Messaging Trends Report—built on 3.8 trillion messages across two decades—reveals is less a story of growth than of behavioural transformation. A decade ago, SMS accounted for 99 per cent of platform traffic. Today it remains critical at 62%, even as a broader ecosystem has expanded around it. Nearly 98 per cent of interactions now span multiple channels. The most consequential shift, though, is not in the numbers but in the nature of what messaging has become.
“Messaging is no longer about delivering updates,” Jelenić says. “It is about sustaining dialogue.”
Customers are no longer passive recipients of notifications, but participants in ongoing conversations with brands, with service agents, and increasingly with AI. “Over the past 20 years, staying relevant has required constant reinvention,” Jelenić reflects, “adapting to new channels, behaviours, and expectations. What worked in one phase quickly becomes insufficient in the next.”
Above Kuala Lumpur is Infobip‘s regional hub for Asia Pacific
Kuala Lumpur is Infobip‘s regional hub for Asia Pacific
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Asia Pacific: The growth frontier
Infobip entered the Asia Pacific region in 2014-2015, establishing Kuala Lumpur as its regional hub, a choice that has proved prescient. APAC is now the fastest-growing messaging region globally, and for Jelenić, it represents something more than a market opportunity. It is where the next decade of customer engagement will be defined.
“Asia Pacific is where the next decade of customer engagement will be defined,” he says. “The region's mobile-first consumers and fast-growing digital economies are accelerating the shift toward more intelligent, real-time engagement faster than anywhere else in the world.”
The data bears this out. Conversational messaging across the region has surged 51 per cent, reflecting consumers who expect timely, relevant, and contextually aware interactions. For businesses operating here, the imperative is clear: move from treating messaging as a channel to treating it as core infrastructure for the customer experience.
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The AI chapter: Infobip AgentOS
The challenge today is no longer which channels to use. It is how to coordinate them effectively, maintaining context across every interaction, at scale. This is the problem that Infobip AgentOS—launched on 1 April 2026 and Infobip's most significant product evolution to date—is built to solve.
The impetus is grounded in a sobering reality. Research conducted with MIT found that only 5 per cent of generative AI pilots currently deliver measurable business value. The gap between AI's promise and its practical impact is vast, and for most enterprises, the reason is not the intelligence of the models, but the absence of the infrastructure needed to put them to work. Infobip AgentOS is the answer to that gap: the orchestrated platform where AI agents, data, channels, and customer intent come together.
Through Infobip's MCP servers, AI agents can now perform real actions—booking flights, setting up two-factor authentication, resolving service queries—rather than simply generating responses. “Businesses are no longer just building communication flows,” Jelenić says, “but managing intelligent, end-to-end engagement systems.”
By 2030, the company predicts that personal AI agents will autonomously manage complex customer interactions—a vision of fully agent-to-agent communication that would have seemed like science fiction when Jelenić was writing early SMS infrastructure in Vodnjan.
Still at the beginning
Twenty years on, Infobip is a different kind of company than the one those two founders imagined: larger, global, technically formidable. But something of the original spirit persists: the belief that the most important work is always the work ahead.
“Messaging has become far more than a communication tool,” Jelenić says. “It is now the infrastructure of customer relationships.” The next era will be shaped by intelligent systems, contextual understanding, and increasingly autonomous interaction, defined, ultimately, “not just by technology, but by how well it can adapt to human needs in real time.”
The future of customer engagement will not be built in a single transformation. It will be built, as Infobip has always built, connection by connection—often invisible, always essential. “Even after 20 years,” Jelenić says simply, “the industry is still at the beginning of its next phase.”
