Thursday February 27, 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) is here, and it’s about to fundamentally change the way we start new businesses or projects, create custom tools, and release ideas online. Our Chief Product and Technology Officer, Giedrius Zakaitis, says that the major shift is at the doorstep, and it might cause a bigger disruption than the internet itself.
We sat down with Giedrius to chat about the upcoming online world where all you need to succeed online is an idea. With Hostinger Horizons, you can now turn that idea into a web app in just a few minutes.
So, Giedrius, before diving deeper into Hostinger Horizons, let’s talk a bit about the industry’s landscape today and how it’s shaped by AI developments. In other words, let’s place our new product within a broader perspective.
In a way, Hostinger Horizons is a natural step – or rather a leap – in technological evolution, which at first evolved gradually but is now advancing at an unprecedented pace.
Even before AI entered the picture, the online presence industry was shifting toward solutions that empower customers, reduce technical burden, and enable not only faster problem-solving but also more flexible and automated web building and deployment.
For instance, coding a website or app was only available to experts. But then we saw the rise of content management systems (CMSs), frameworks, drag-and-drop website builders, and even AI that writes code.
The most important outcome of this evolution, in my opinion, is that it made online presence increasingly accessible for more and more people. It unlocked huge potential for those who have ideas and want to turn them into reality.
Still, until very recently, there have been limitations even within CMS, such as the plugin ecosystem and back-end-enabled functionality. If you had any custom idea, you probably wouldn’t be able to translate it into an online presence just by yourself. You’d still need someone with technical skills to help you.
So, that’s where we are moving next – to remove existing limitations and enable a flawless and fully integrated experience, where web app building would only involve chatting with an AI. This will no doubt have huge implications, not just for the industry, but for society as a whole.
It’s been a while since we started integrating AI into our products and activities. How much have we relied on it, and where is it making the biggest impact? How does that compare to our latest breakthrough?
AI did not happen yesterday – we were already relying on it quite a lot. At our company, it contributes significantly to the success of our customers. It helps them solve their issues faster and enables our Customer Success team to be more efficient.
We can talk about two angles here, though the line between them becomes ever more blurred.
The first is the internal angle. We use AI to streamline many internal processes and automate various solutions for our Customer Success team. Although some still think AI isn’t helpful in customer support, our experience tells the opposite. With the right data, AI can demonstrate outstanding capabilities in this area, helping the Customer Success team navigate vast knowledge efficiently, resolving customer issues faster, and letting them focus on more advanced technical issues.
And the other angle? What tools are we talking about?
Then, there is the external angle, which has to do with us trying to be proactive in our customer support rather than reactive.
We have tools like the AI Troubleshooter, which become more and more useful for our teams working on fixing the issues. Before, if you didn’t know how to open a firewall port or edit something in WordPress, you’d need to ask a human specialist. Now, you can basically get the necessary actions and commands done by the AI.
The proactive approach also extends to other areas, such as helping customers with the domain name for their projects. AI can suggest available domain names based on the client’s description of the project.
And there we are, already in the territory where AI can offer you a lot more – like building a fully fledged website according to your preferences. Today, in just three or so sentences, you can build a website with relevant visuals, texts, and even product catalogs for an online store. That’s where we are currently at.
With the rise of AI, expectations and opportunities also increase. But how exactly did we go from “let’s ask AI to fix the issue” to “let’s make AI build anything we can imagine by simply responding to chat prompts”?
I think it all started with us thinking about how a big part of building a web presence consists of the same things. 80% or 90% of the website is basically composed of the same elements – you need a page menu, a customer login portal, a payment module, and things like that. And just a small part of it is custom.
So, why not automate more than 90% of the work and then let the customer adjust what is unique? And what if a web app could be built without any technical knowledge, just by saying what you want?
Current CMS solutions have made progress, but many still present challenges – either by being too technical or creating obstacles when deploying a website. Often, users still need to handle code, even if AI generates it. So, in order to realize your idea online, you often need either money, time, or knowledge – and very often – all of it.
We aim for a completely new user experience where all you need is an idea, and you can make it a reality in minutes without any hassle. And we made it. We have a solution that, I believe, will change the way small businesses operate and the way people think about the possibilities of their online presence.
We are currently at the stage where people rely more and more on AI chatbots for various tasks.
For example, I love AI-generated travel itineraries. With AI, it’s not only easy to customize it, but it also allows one to avoid sponsored content that dominates traditional travel blogs and websites. And, of course, AI has become a coder’s best friend. My favorite tool in this field – Cursor – has made my coding more productive. So, we wanted to translate this experience of interacting with generative AIs into online presence building.
So, it’s something like ChatGPT for realizing ideas online, right? Could you tell us more about how people will use this new tool to bring their projects online?
ChatGPT for building an online presence is quite an accurate description. Our new tool, Hostinger Horizons, basically simulates the experience of talking with someone highly skilled in software building who can give you possible solutions and make adjustments instantly.
A process that would take a lot of back and forth with a human web developer, cost you a lot of money, and drag on for months can now be done within a few minutes of writing prompts. It opens up limitless opportunities to iterate and improve. If you don’t like something or want to try a different design, layout, or check-out mechanism – you can edit right away.
We also did not stop with just code writing and web building. Large Language Models (LLMs) became very good at helping write code, and that’s great for developers, but not directly for the user. We want to offer a fully integrated solution for launching a web app without any human touch. From SSLs to domain name and deployment – everything can be taken care of in a few minutes; no extra help is needed.
You’ve mentioned that such capabilities can have a huge impact not only on the industry but also on the whole business environment and society as a whole. You’ve even said that it might be bigger than the internet. For some, this might sound like an overstatement. How confident are you that it will be a game-changer?
So, we are talking here about making things much easier, not just a bit, but many times over. That’s why I think it will be revolutionary.
The threshold of going online with your product, startup, or store will be lowered significantly, so we will have a lot more people turning their ideas into online tools. In turn, customer competition will increase because many similar products and platforms will be available. Entering the market will become easy, but in order to stay in it, one will have to focus on such things as value proposition, marketing, UX, and more.
That leads to where AI can bring the industry and our services. Within our new product, we are already trying to integrate tools that can help a customer successfully grow post-deployment.
I’m talking about things like generating a heat map of the website even before it receives visitors, providing suggestions for UX improvements based on data, and helping with ads. With such tools, we are trying to help our customers not only with all the technical work in the building and launching stage but also with what comes next.
Beyond launching online businesses incredibly easily, what other applications and transformations can Hostinger Horizons bring about?
It is not limited to online business building. You can use it just for your entertainment – for example, creating a language learning app based on your preferred way of learning.
Then, there is another area where what we are doing can become indispensable. Hostinger Horizons is as good for building online platforms and enterprises as for making custom tools that can help you improve and be more efficient. So, it can also create a personal efficiency tool.
For example, I made myself a QR code generator because the existing products are full of ads, or you need to pay for them. Basically, if you identify an area where you could improve or automate tasks that are necessary but time-consuming, you can build a solution for yourself.
You can do it on the company level as well. In organizations, the process of developing useful solutions is usually lengthy and full of bureaucratic and technical obstacles, with various departments needing to be involved.
With Hostinger Horizons, companies are free to experiment, create, and iterate freely without the shadow of huge costs and looming resources. That opens unprecedented opportunities to improve an organization’s productivity and efficiency, allowing it to focus on the most important things rather than on mundane tasks.
It all sounds quite futuristic. But it’s here. How long did it take to have Hostinger Horizons ready, and how did we manage to do that?
That’s true. The process was pretty fast. To make this a reality – to get new ideas to go live in minutes, to enable people and organizations to create tools that are limited only by their imagination – we focused on what remains constant rather than what changes. That is, people have ideas, want to realize them, and want to make money from them. In the context of this constant, we tried to mobilize today’s technical possibilities and advancements in AI as well as our own experience.
We do not have a five-year plan to follow. Rather, we wake up every morning and do the things that make the biggest impact today or in the long term based on what we’ve learned yesterday. Of course, we have our mission in mind – which is to enable millions of people around the world to create and become successful online. Hostinger Horizons is the direct result of this approach.
Also, we know that if we try to show our customers that incredible things and all types of crazy ideas can be implemented super fast, we ourselves have to move at the speed of light, too. In fact, that is the only way to go in today’s world.
So, we developed the foundation of our new product in about a month. It took two more to do the internal testing, improving, and polishing to be able to present a working product. And now we are here – ready to release it to the world.
Very impressive things are possible right now, indeed. So, I want to encourage everyone to just go out there and try out these possibilities.
Part of Hostinger’s Communications Team, Kotryna is responsible for building and maintaining relationships with media outlets and ensuring that the organization’s achievements and initiatives receive public recognition. In her free time, Kotryna likes to explore new places and take photos.
