10th Forum of Advanced Technologies

The panel

Taking part, in the order they sat on the stage: Jelena Preradović Stevanović, Manager for Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement, South-East Europe, at Philip Morris International; Jelena Milošević, Technology Partner Specialist at IBM; Marko Jovanović, founder and director of Marteco Digital Services; and Marija Suzić of NALED.

In the organisers' own words, the session brought together experts from business, technology and institutions to explore how jobs, skills and workforce strategies are changing, and how employers, institutions and talent can prepare for what comes next.

What the discussion covered

The scale of the question is not in dispute. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 puts it this way: if the world's workforce were a group of 100 people, 59 would need training by 2030, and 11 of those would be unlikely to receive it, which leaves their employment prospects increasingly at risk.

On the side of the firms, the discussion turned less on the technology than on whether organisations are ready for it. Technology makes the transformation possible, but people are the ones who carry it out, so organisational culture and the willingness to keep learning decide the pace. Training on new tools was described as a small part of that, with most of the adoption happening through everyday work and collaboration. Critical thinking was named as the human quality that holds its value, with the difficulty being not the scarcity of information but the abundance of it, and the filtering of it resting on knowledge, experience, ethics and empathy.

From the technology side the argument was that piloting artificial intelligence as a tool is no longer enough, and that it has to enter a company's processes systemically, which changes how the work itself is understood rather than adding an application to it. The roles expected to grow are those of supervising, controlling and orchestrating software agents, described not as a different set of people but as the evolution of skills that already exist. Responsibility, on this account, stays with the person and the organisation, and defining it is the purpose of governance frameworks, together with explainability and transparency.

For small and medium enterprises the preconditions came first. Before any artificial intelligence, a company needs defined and standardised business processes and a genuine knowledge base, because without documentation and institutional memory there is nothing for the technology to follow. The sequence proposed was the company's long-term goals, then a gap analysis across the business functions, then a strategy of at least five years, with quicker wins prioritised ahead of the more complex work. Some competences will stop being needed and others will appear.

On the institutional side the emphasis fell on education and on regulation. Education, it was argued, has to give young people more than the tool: when to use it, which data may be used, and how to check the result. Where a system carries real risk, people have to remain in control of it. Alongside that came the individual's own responsibility, lifelong learning and the habit of thinking critically, and concrete asks for a framework for the use of artificial intelligence in schools and for training in these tools across public administration.

The moderator's summing up returned to the same place. Education is the main lever: employment in education is expected to grow, and its task is to teach young people to think critically and to tell what is accurate from what is not.