AI won't replace people, it'll replace the incurious, says Hostinger CMO Kristina Strimaite

Hostinger CMO Kristina Strimaite believes artificial intelligence will not take away jobs, but it will leave behind those who refuse to engage with it. "I don't believe that AI is going to replace people, but it's going to replace people who are not curious and who are not using it in one way or another," she said in a wide-ranging conversation with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project. The interview traced how a company from Lithuania, a country rarely mentioned among global startup hubs, built a web platform that now serves customers in more than 150 countries without raising venture capital.

Founded in Kaunas in 2004, Hostinger began as a web hosting provider and has since evolved into a platform for building and managing online businesses, with AI website builder and business tools at its core. The company closed 2025 with revenue of 275.4 million euros, up 51% from the previous year, its fourth straight year of growth above the 50% mark. India is its largest market by active users, ahead of Brazil, Indonesia and the United States.

Global by necessity, disciplined by design

When Shradha asked what it takes to build a company of this scale out of Lithuania, Strimaite was candid about the constraint that shaped the ambition. "We are global because we had no other choice. Our market is very small, so we could either be a small local company or go global," she said. She compared Vilnius to an early Silicon Valley, pointing to a technology community that held more than 400 knowledge-sharing sessions last year, where companies openly exchange lessons on scaling, failures and customer engagement.

On the question of building without large fundraises, Strimaite argued that staying bootstrapped sends a message to customers rather than investors. "We treat our company money as our own. We don't do reckless behaviour," she said, adding that every marketing hire is expected to understand that each dollar invested should return to the company's bank account. She cited a recent example where, after more than 100 live customer interviews at the start of a quarter, the company concluded its strategy was wrong and reshaped it quickly, a flexibility she believes funded companies with rigid plans often lack.

The one-person company era

A significant part of the conversation focused on the rise of solo entrepreneurs, a trend Shradha noted is accelerating in India as well. Strimaite believes the shift is only going to speed up. Launching a business, which once took weeks or months, can now happen in a single prompt, she said. The harder work has moved downstream, to driving traffic, staying profitable and managing operations, often with AI as the extra pair of hands that small teams lack.

She shared the example of a school student she mentored who built a working tool to automate test grading in two days, a product now used by four teachers at her school. "In my early days, I would need a couple of weeks, if not months. Now we can do it in a couple of days," she said.

How does Hostinger use AI inside its own marketing team

Asked how her team of 140 marketers across countries including India, Brazil and Indonesia uses AI internally, Strimaite pointed to a culture set by an AI-first product organisation. Her creative team produced the company's first fully AI-generated television advertisements, complete with voiceovers and music, which ran in multiple countries within a couple of months.

Beyond content production, she said AI has moved from an operational tool to a decision-making aid. Large volumes of marketing data that once required hours of chart reading are now summarised quickly, allowing faster calls on brand, digital and performance spending. Curiosity, she stressed, is the entry ticket. Because the product is AI-first, marketers must understand it deeply to sell it honestly.

Strimaite also spoke about her own evolution as a leader, crediting current CEO Giedrius Zakaitis, appointed in June 2026 to lead the company's AI-first strategy, with nudging her from a hands-on style towards what she calls quiet leadership. Her practical takeaway: do not fear silent gaps in meetings, because that is when teams begin to speak.

For founders, her advice distilled into three principles: solve a real problem, refuse to be limited by a small home market, and hand operational work to AI so that time flows to customers and product. As one-person companies multiply across India and beyond, her closing conviction may prove the most durable. Technology will keep compressing what once took months into days, but the direct, personal touch with customers, she believes, is the one thing AI will never replace.