The Room That Got It | Upskilling in the Age of Agentic AI

There's a particular kind of energy in a room where people have shown up not because they had to, but because they needed to. That's exactly what I felt walking into the Rome Business School campus in Belgrade on the evening of April 15th.

Almost 60 people registered. By the time we started, the room was full, the questions were relentless, and nobody was checking their phones.

Why This Room, Why Now

From a PR perspective, the Rome Business School audience is exactly the kind of room you want to be in. These aren't casual tech enthusiasts, they're executive MBA students, senior managers, and founders who make or influence real business decisions. They evaluate vendors. They recommend tools. They set strategy. For Wonderful, this wasn't about exposure, but about access to exactly the kind of people who move budgets and make decisions.

Speaking opportunities at institutions like RBS also carry a different kind of credibility than conference panels or media appearances. The implicit endorsement of the institution matters. When a business school invites you to lead a masterclass, the message to the audience is: this person has something worth your time. That's not something you can buy with a sponsorship package.

The Format Was the Message

We made a deliberate choice not to do a classic keynote or fireside chat. The session was structured as an Interactive Executive Briefing, a focused breakdown of the strategic shift happening right now, followed by live problem-solving with the audience's actual operational challenges.

What struck me was how quickly Wonderful Mr. Bajer handed the floor back to the audience. No lengthy career retrospective, no extended pitch. He introduced the framework, gave a couple of sharp examples, and then asked: "Give me one operational process in your company that costs you the most time and resources right now." And then worked through it. Live.

That kind of confidence - the kind that doesn't need to impress, is what made the room lean in. For a PR person watching from the side, it's also the most effective sales move in the book. You don't pitch the product. You demonstrate the thinking, and let people connect the dots themselves.

Wonderful's Krešimir Šuljak and Miloš Drača were also there, working the room during the networking portion and fielding questions directly. It's one thing to hear the vision from the stage. It's another to immediately test it in conversation with the people building it.

The Numbers Are Not Subtle

For anyone who still needs the data: according to McKinsey's November 2025 research, demand for AI fluency has jumped nearly sevenfold in just two years, and nearly every occupation will experience skill shifts by 2030. And yet the response from most organizations remains underwhelming. McKinsey confirms that 80% of tech-focused organizations say upskilling is the most effective way to reduce skills gaps, but only 28% are actually planning to invest in upskilling programs over the next two to three years.

The gap between knowing and doing is where companies lose ground.

April 2026 research puts it plainly: successful companies will be those that build a true hybrid human-agent workforce, and that means equipping teams with the skills to thrive in an agentic world, alongside effective change management to ensure people actually embrace the shift.

Real upskilling looks like what happened at RBS that evening. Not a certificate course. A room full of sharp people walking away with a different way of thinking about where AI actually fits in their business.

After the Session

The networking ran well past schedule. Questions kept coming. One attendee told me she was bringing the agent framework to her leadership team the next morning :)

We ended the night the way the best Belgrade evenings do, burgers at Burgos with Ivan Minić, who has quietly become one of those people you genuinely look forward to seeing whenever Vedran is in town. Good food, good company, and the kind of conversation that only happens after two hours in a room where something actually landed.

More of this. Always.