AI Moves Businesses from Co-Pilot to Autopilot

At Shift Zadar 2025, Josip Ivkovic, CTO and Co-Founder of REARM, shook up the room by flipping the script on AI in business.

He dared companies to move past the hype and dive into AI that actually gets stuff done.

The kicker? We’re no longer talking about co-pilots helping humans – we’re talking about autopilots running whole business operations while we sit back and watch.

Let’s get back to basics

Josip began by grounding the audience in a familiar tension: what’s hype, and what’s real in AI? 

Since the transistor, we haven’t seen this level of disruption. Everyone’s talking about job loss, Terminators, or the end of the world – but for builders, the real question is: how do we deliver amazing services and products right now?

The answer, he argued, lies not in fear, but in fundamentals. Businesses must return to basics: step into the customer’s shoes, identify real value (time savings, efficiency, profit), and design systems that serve those needs. 

T-Shirt shop shows the need for smarter business tools

To illustrate, Josip walked the audience through a simple scenario: starting a t-shirt printing shop. 

At first, you might use ChatGPT to draft a business plan. Soon, you’re juggling 10+ Excel sheets, HubSpot for CRM, Jira for tasks, and subscriptions just keep piling up. Very quickly, data becomes fragmented. Reporting gets messy. And all these little manual tasks amount to a lot of consumed time; daily. 

It’s an all-too-familiar story. And it’s exactly where Ivković’s team saw an opportunity to innovate. 

Enter Autorun: AI for business autopilots

Josip’s company built Autorun, a platform designed to unify business management and process automation.

Instead of stitching together spreadsheets and SaaS tools, Autorun lets businesses: 

• Build custom applications (CRM, ERP, inventory systems) in minutes. 

• Automate workflows through readable, visual “flowchart-like” development. 

• Deploy AI agents that act like employees – handling orders, sending invoices, managing support, and even talking to customers via WhatsApp or SMS. 

It’s not about replacing employees, it’s about empowering them to do 10x more.

How to create an app in under 10 minutes

The heart of the session was a live demo. In under 10 minutes, Josip built an app for a fictional t-shirt shop using Autorun. 

Creating an App

By prompting the AI assistant (“I own a t-shirt printing shop…”), Autorun generated a full application with several dashboards for order management, inventory tracking, customer management, etc. 

Hiring Agents

Josip created specialized AI agents to confirm and process customer requests, and to answer customer queries in natural language. 

Integrating with a Messaging System

The agents were integrated with the Infobip platform for real-time messaging capabilities over the SMS and WhatsApp. Josip demonstrated how easy it was to integrate Infobip MCP Servers into their existing system to complement already impressive set of skills each hired agent possessed. 

In seconds, he showed how an order could be placed via WhatsApp, processed in the system, inventory checked, and a confirmation sentc – all without a human intervention. 

The demo highlighted not only speed but most of all the flexibility for developers to extend the system with custom React components, Node.js functions, or database triggers.

Built for Scale, Backed by Microsoft

Autorun runs on Microsoft Azure infrastructure, with enterprise scalability and resilience in mind. 

While the platform is currently hosted on its own cloud, the team is working toward full availability on the Azure Marketplace, enabling enterprise clients to provision instances directly within their existing agreements. 

Are you afraid of agents?

Josip closed on a provocative question: Who here is afraid of AI agents? 

For some, the thought of autonomous agents managing critical business processes is unsettling. The fear is misplaced. The real risk isn’t AI taking over – it’s businesses failing to adapt. 

At Shift Zadar, his message landed clearly: the future belongs to those who embrace AI not just as a helper, but as a trusted autopilot for business. 

Want to know what else was discussed at Infobip Shift at Zadar in 2025? Find out here!