"Offering benefits is valuable, but the heart of the company is more important."

Daniel Ackermann is a passionate company founder and entrepreneur. He is currently the CEO of Luppa and Degordian.

The Degordian Group comprises multiple agencies specializing in creativity, e-commerce, digital solutions development, digital growth strategy, and employer branding. Additionally, it organizes HR Weekend, the largest HR festival in the Adriatic region. With five offices across Europe and the USA, the group employs over 100 people and has been recognized as the best employer in Croatia six times.

Luppa's team strives to ensure that their clients' employees feel valued and happy, enabling companies to maximize and leverage their internal talent to its fullest potential. Luppa applies analytics and artificial intelligence in the field of employee engagement. It is one of the fastest growing HR tech start-ups in the Adriatic region. Its average revenue growth rate is 30% per quarter.

Daniel Ackermann also founded other companies, the first at the age of 22. In his free time, he loves running, sports, cars and art.

How is artificial intelligence changing the field of human resource management (HR)?

"The impact of artificial intelligence in HR can be categorized into two areas: efficiency and quality." 

Efficiency refers to completing tasks in less time. Quality means performing tasks at a higher standard.

I believe AI in HR primarily enhances efficiency, whereas its direct impact on quality remains less pronounced. However, by significantly improving efficiency, AI can indirectly contribute to higher quality as well.

Can you give an example?

At Luppa, we have developed an AI-powered solution that analyzes data and generates action plan proposals. This makes it easier for the HR department to complete the same amount of work in less time. This is a prime example of improving efficiency.

Large companies with up to 50,000 employees have up to 10,000 teams and have until now lacked capacity to create action plans at team level. With Luppa AI, for the first time in history, they can do just that. Beyond improving speed, more focused action plans also contribute to better results and quality.

We conducted a study comparing the performance of Luppa AI with real HR expert. Luppa AI performs above average compared to real people. This serves as clear evidence that AI is already remarkably powerful, and its impact will only continue to grow in the future.

And how are you dealing with the challenge of credibility of artificial intelligence? Some DeepSeek or ChatGPT responses to simple factual questions remain incorrect, disastrous even.

It depends on the prompts themselves. At Luppa, we spent months refining prompts and optimizing data to achieve the highest possible quality. However, we still don’t recommend implementing the proposed plan exactly as it is. Instead, it should be used as a starting point or recommendation, with the final selection of activities made by the leader.

You have received the best employer in Croatia award six times. How do you ensure that the culture in your companies continues to attract talent?

Many companies prioritize benefits such as offices, parking, equipment, and the like. Offering attractive benefits is valuable, but the heart of the company itself is even more important. That you, as the owner or CEO in every decision you make consider how this decision will affect your employees, and whether it truly is the best course of action for your employees.

It's a mindset. If you have that, even if the benefits aren’t the best, sooner or later you will create the best workplace. If you don't have that, you may have the best office and equipment, but it won't be enough.

How have you personally dealt with the challenges of leading employees in a rapidly growing company, such as Degordian?

For me, that’s the most difficult aspect. It's like playing Super Mario. Now you're at level 5, you need to get to level 10, level 11. But each level keeps getting progressively more difficult. This is what a growing company feels like. It's easy when you have 20 employees. At 50, it's already more difficult. With 100 employees, more difficult still. You have to adapt.

In our service-based business, it often happens that the founder becomes the star of the company and starts hiring assistants, but everything still revolves around them. This is not scalable and does not allow for growth. 

"It is much better for the founder to step away from operations as soon as possible and focus on building the system. The founder is not the system but the one building the system."

Degordian switched from IT and marketing to the HR vertical. That is very unusual. How did it come about?

Degordian has traditionally covered marketing, IT and digital segments. We did not cover HR and had no ambitions to develop an HR vertical.

Five years ago, a talent crisis emerged because companies had trouble recruiting employees. This became a challenge, so companies started approaching us. They kept saying, you are the top employer, please help develop our own employer branding.

We had no ambitions to enter the HR field, but we realized that there was a significant gap. HR agencies cannot deliver marketing tools (web, PR, video), while marketing agencies do not understand HR. We provide marketing support and understand HR. Thus, Enstring, the first specialized employer branding agency, was created. It started as a small experiment, but today it works on global projects and implementations.

Luppa was created in a similar fashion. Since we strived to be the best employer, we wanted to create the best tool for measuring employee satisfaction and engagement. We created an internal solution that became known in the market and several clients approached us expressing an interest in our solution.

We held an internal hackathon to truly create a solution suitable for others. We didn't expect much, but we received inquiries from 50 companies – ranging from smaller to larger businesses and leading IT companies. That’s when we realized we had something truly special. That's how Luppa was founded. Since then, it has been growing steadily, onboarding new clients every month. It all started without ambition, but today the company works with multinational and large clients, continuously pushing the boundaries every day.

How is the field of HR management developing in Croatian companies compared to other countries?

Ona global level, the talent shortage is an ever-growing challenge, and motivating and retaining talent is one of the top priorities. In Croatia, and throughout the region, this problem is even more pronounced. The crisis that began in 2008 was so severe that for almost the next 10 years, unemployment was extremely high. In such a situation, companies did not consider people and HR important, investments were minimal and HR was mostly administrative.

The past 5 years have been exactly the opposite. 

"The talent is sorely lacking, it is difficult to retain and motivate, and HR has suddenly become an extremely important link in the chain. Budgets and needs for knowledge, tools and services are growing drastically."

Today is therefore the golden age of HR, and in our country, this speed of change is even more pronounced.

You are also the force behind HR.WEEKEND. What inspired you to take on this project?

We were exploring HR events for our HR services and products. We found many with 300, 500 attendees, but these events tended to be quite corporate and traditional. Looking at the marketing industry we come from, Weekend (Media Festival) had 5,000 people in attendance, Dani komunikacija had 4,000 attendees.

In addition to attracting a large number of people, both events are of extremely high quality, modern, engaging and fun. HR is currently experiencing a golden age and we thought it was unfair that it was lagging so far behind in terms of events. That's why they wanted to create an event worthy of the HR industry. That's how HR.WEEKEND was created.

We connected with Weekend as the largest regional festival, and organized HR.Weekend in Rovinj as part of Weekend. The idea is to replicate the success of Weekend. What we want is for HR.Weekend to be for the HR industry what Weekend is for marketing and media.

HR.Weekend is part of Weekend itself, so every HR participant can attend Weekend content, networking, and entertainment. Both events together have 7,000 attendees, the program is carried out in 9 halls, there are over 10 parties and the events represent incredible value. Since its introduction, HR.Weekend has been growing incredibly. In its first experimental year, it attracted 500 participants, growing to 750 in the second year. This year, there will be over 1,000 participants.

What is the vision for HR.WEEKEND for the future?

From the very beginning, our goal was to position HR.WEEKEND as the central hub for regional HR. A place for top-quality content, exceptional networking and great entertainment, an event that attracts all HR experts and brings the entire industry together once a year.

I think we have already achieved that vision, but we want to take it even further and higher.

You were featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Do you have ambitions to appear on other prestigious lists recognizing the best and most influential – either personally or through your companies?

Both personally and through Degordian/Luppa, we have always strived to excel and continuously push our own boundaries. We are very grateful for all the recognition we have already received, but we will continue to work with the same intensity and hope that some of our efforts will be acknowledged.