Vid Štimac

independent adviser·AI policy & adoption researcher

I specialise in what organisations do with data, analytics, and AI: turning ambition into systems, teams, and practice.

How strategies get written and then implemented, how organisations buy AI, and why deployments stall or succeed. I advise on implementation, but I also prototype and build. Alone, or with engineering and design teams I bring together and run. I have been making analytics and data products for almost ten years.

VEDAME is my independent practice, open to select advisory and hands-on consultancy work: AI strategy and implementation, prototypes and products, procurement and adoption advice, tailored hands-on training, research and evaluation.

Implementation

Vid Štimac presenting Lorya to a full room

For four years I managed Harnessing AI for the Common Good, UNDP Serbia’s national AI programme, working day to day with the team behind Serbia’s AI agenda.

I have also spent the past few years prototyping and piloting AI in the public sector and with UNDP at country, regional, and global level. The projects ranged from document pipelines and knowledge assistants to mammography screening and railway safety. The work was the same each time: scoping, building, bringing people along, and getting tools actually used. Some became real products; others taught us why these deployments stall.

One of these is Lorya, in UNDP’s Local Language Accelerator, where ten of us built a platform that turns printed cultural heritage into machine-readable text. We presented it at the 2025 AI Action Summit in Paris, and launched it as an open-source solution in April 2026 at the UN House in Belgrade, generously supported by the governments of France and Japan. There is a minute of it below.

Lorya in 60 Seconds: AI for the World’s Languagesyoutube · UNDP Serbia · 1 min

More on Lorya: UNDP’s project page; this write-up by my dear colleague Tamara Butigan-Vučaj of the National Library of Serbia; and Every Language Matters by my dear colleague Barbora Bromová and co-authors.

Policy

Policy development, for me, means being in the room where the text gets written: collaborating, negotiating, drafting. I contributed to Serbia’s National AI Strategy and helped facilitate its adoption by parliament. I worked the same way on the laws and directives behind Serbia’s regulatory sandbox for autonomous-vehicle testing. Most of this happened during my years managing Serbia’s national AI project at UNDP.

I came to this through development institutions, mostly as an impact assessment, data governance, and quantitative economics expert, advising and providing technical assistance through UNDP, the World Bank, and GIZ, on everything from open data to administrative reform.

Research

My research asks how organisations adopt AI. My doctoral work, at the Institute for International Business at WU Vienna under Phillip Nell, is in international business strategy. There I mostly collaborate with Jelena Cerar, currently on how multinational firms allocate their AI capability as regulation accumulates and how AI talent migrates internationally.

I also study AI policy and regulation with my colleague Slobodan Tomić. Recent articles appeared in the Journal of European Public Policy and the Review of Policy Research.

Previously I worked at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies and at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, and have published in development economics, information systems, and public management.

Contact

vid.stimac@vedame.ai cv / linkedin client login