Innovantage Podcast

AI is changing more than how software gets written. It's changing what engineers do, how companies build products, and which skills will remain valuable.

Meet Ákos Maróy, a Zurich-based fractional CTO/CDO, innovation expert, startup mentor, and deep tech strategist. His career spans entrepreneurship, building machine learning startups, working at Google and Meta, and evaluating European innovation funding proposals.

As AI agents take over more of the coding process, technical expertise isn't disappearing, but the way we use it is changing. And with smaller teams gaining the ability to build their own tools, the future may depend less on how much we can create and more on knowing what's actually worth building.

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How do two major insurers merge their IT, data, and teams without customers feeling a thing? In this episode of the Innovantage podcast, we go inside the ERGO and Gjensidige integration across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to see what insurance M&A really demands from technology and people.

Kristaps Spundins is Information Technology and Operations Officer at ADB Gjensidige and Deputy CIO at ERGO Latvia, with more than 14 years in insurance after starting his career as a software engineer. He now works at the center of a cross-border transformation, bringing two established insurers’ organisations, processes, systems, products, and data under one roof while keeping service running smoothly for every customer.

You’ll come away knowing how to make hard integration calls faster, keep a regulated business stable while everything underneath it changes, and protect the knowledge and relationships that give an acquisition its real value.

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𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼 𝗩𝗖 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀? 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 #𝟱𝟴 𝗴𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆-𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗩𝗶𝗸𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗷𝗮 𝗧𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗹.

Viktorija Trimbel is a VC investor, strategic advisor, and Managing Director at Coinvest Capital, an evergreen sovereign venture capital fund investing alongside business angels and other VCs. With more than 30 years across corporate governance, M&A, investing, and fundraising, she brings both an investor’s view of risk and a long-term perspective on how startup ecosystems develop.

Funding is rarely just about having the strongest idea or the best-looking pitch deck. The real edge comes from understanding how investors think, what builds trust, where risk actually sits, and how to build a company that can attract capital without losing sight of the business itself.

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𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗮 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗺𝗲? 𝗜𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁, 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗮 𝗦𝗮𝗶𝗸𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗸𝗮𝗶𝘁ė 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀.

Justina Saikauskaitė is a Fractional CMO and Brand Strategist helping startups and challenger brands turn chaotic marketing into brand-led strategy that supports revenue growth. Her experience spans positioning, go-to-market strategy, brand and product launches, and fractional marketing leadership across agency, in-house, and freelance roles.

Strong branding is less about having the perfect creative idea and more about making deliberate choices, testing whether they work, and committing long enough to become recognizable. From sharper positioning to smarter use of AI, the practical takeaway is simple: more marketing activity means little when people cannot understand, remember, or trust the brand behind it.

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How is AI changing the relationship between business and technology — and what happens when even great tech fails to deliver business value? On the Innovantage Podcast, Gediminas Zalys from Accenture UK & Ireland unpacks what digital transformation actually looks like inside large enterprises.

Gediminas Zalys is an engineering leader focused on AI, machine learning, and business transformation. With experience spanning engineering, consulting, entrepreneurship, and enterprise technology at Accenture, he has seen both sides of the equation: ambitious technology built without the right business case, and business decisions transformed by what new technology suddenly makes possible.

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Sales and recruiting rarely get discussed together, even though they shape each other constantly. This episode, Max sits with Edvin Vosylius, founder of European Sales Headhunting Agency, a Vilnius-based recruitment agency focused specifically on sales talent, to unpack how those two functions collide in practice.

Edvin brings 19 years of hands-on sales experience to the table, having worked as a rep, a head of sales, and a chief sales officer before building a business around placing salespeople for a living. That path, including a failed corporate venture and a startup collapse, shapes everything he now looks for when hiring or advising others in the field.

In this episode, hear about mid-market versus enterprise sales, the mechanics of building a profitable recruitment agency, the traits recruiters look for in top salespeople, and how AI is reshaping CVs and interviews.

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What does it take to build a defense tech startup, raise €1.1 million, and manufacture drone technology in Europe? In this episode of the Innovantage Podcast, Elvinas Kukys, CEO and Co-Founder of Luna Robotics, shares how the Lithuanian hardware startup is building advanced vision systems for unmanned platforms without relying on Chinese supply chains or unnecessary AI.

Drawing on his military background and startup journey, Elvinas explains how Luna Robotics grew from an idea into one of Lithuania's emerging defense tech companies, developing dual-use technology designed for both military and civilian applications.

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Why do 70% of mergers and acquisitions fail after closing? 

Sabine Janssens has led more than 40 M&A integration projects over the past four years and developed a pragmatic 100-day integration model used in buy-and-build environments. Drawing on decades of strategic marketing and integration experience, she works with acquiring companies to align strategy, operations, technology, and people after the deal closes.

Rather than treating integration as an operational checklist, this episode explains how to preserve business value, avoid the mistakes that derail acquisitions, manage IT integration without disrupting customers, and keep founders, employees, and leadership aligned throughout the transition.

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Can AI actually fix your skin or just feed your insecurities? On this episode, the founder of System Akvile breaks down how a skincare app reached 900K+ users by letting data, not assumptions, drive the product.

Akvile Ignotaite is a PhD data scientist who moved from corporate finance and M&A into founding System Akvile, an AI-powered skin-health platform now used by more than 900,000 people across Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Her path ran through economics in Lithuania, an MBA in Germany, and a forced detour into statistics and coding during her PhD, all of which now shape how she builds for a Gen Z and Gen Alpha audience.

Akvile gets specific about what worked and what failed: why the original medical-grade app flatlined on user acquisition, how launching a pimple character on TikTok before writing a single line of code validated demand, and why staying disciplined on data rather than chasing big-tech features keeps a lean startup alive.

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Can AI transformation actually make a company faster, or is it just hype? In this episode of the Innovantage Podcast, we go inside Wix to find out what real AI transformation looks like when you're running engineering sites across Europe.

This is the latest episode in our ongoing series with BMI Executive Institute, spotlighting leaders who put business theory into practice.

Joining Max is Monika Laukaitė, a senior operations and site leadership executive at Wix and a current EMBA participant at BMI Executive Institute, who oversees R&D and engineering sites across Lithuania, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and Dublin while scaling teams and folding AI into daily operations.

A practical look at how to roll out AI without forcing tools teams don't understand, what genuinely breaks as a company scales across markets, and how to measure whether a transformation is actually working. 

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More about the episode partners: www.bmiinstitute.com  

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