Eleven Layers of AI: Grobelnik at the SDH Event on AI and Business (in Slovene)

On October 21, the Slovenian Sovereign Holding (SDH), together with Delo mediji and with the Jožef Stefan Institute as expert partner, held an event in Ljubljana on how AI is changing business models, jobs and the competitiveness of companies. Marko Grobelnik said AI is in a phase of exponential growth that did not start yesterday and will continue as long as at least some key parameters keep growing exponentially. He presented the AI ecosystem as eleven layers: rare earths, energy, GPUs, data centres, data, algorithms, models, the model environment, agents, applications and physical AI. He explained where Slovenia sits in this chain and noted that applications are the layer where value is added and money is made. Blaž Kažič presented how the Institute built a generative AI system for SDH. It runs inside SDH's own environment, and the agent has limited access to the database. Every figure it reports must come with a source, and report preparation has dropped from a day to a few hours or minutes. Generating is cheap, he noted, but verifying is not. The event also featured the national AI Factory and supercomputers, Telekom Slovenije, SIJ and Hiproject, which brings humanoid robots to Slovenian companies.