AI changed what "enough engineers" means. Tooling shifts every few months. Agent-generated code needs new review practices. Standing still isn't an option, and building that muscle alone inside one company is slow.

Visma solved this at group scale years before AI made it urgent.  Five competence centres — in Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and Portugal — that employ 1,300+ engineers, developers, security specialists and domain experts, available exclusively to companies inside the Visma group.

Same time zone, same people, every day

"We build teams permanently with whatever is on the other side, whether that's Scandinavians or Dutch people," says Agnius Paradnikas, Managing Director of the Lithuania centre.

That's different from the churn common across outsourcing, where high attrition resets context every few months. Visma's centres run the other way: the same engineers, on the same product, for years, in the same working hours.

e-conomic, market leader in Danish SME accounting software, felt that difference directly. They weren't looking for a nearshoring partner to fill seats; they wanted stability and made a shared bet on user-centric engineering. Competence Centres also cut their time to hire, and roles that once sat open for months now close in a few weeks. Today they employ +60 talents in Porto, Timisoara, and Kosice.

"Extending our team in competence centres helped us bridge the gap between complex engineering and user needs," says Karina Wellendorph, Managing Director at e-conomic. "By prioritising the resolution of real-world customer pain points, they have helped us build features that deliver tangible value and a better user experience."

Compliance doesn't slow down because AI sped up

Tracking AI tooling, orchestration, and the security practices around agent-generated code is a full-time job on its own. Visma's Competence Centres embed engineers whose only focus is exactly that, done at group scale, shared across Visma companies instead of rebuilt from zero in each one.

Pen test findings. Security questionnaires. GDPR. DORA and NIS2 readiness. Faster shipping means more surface area to secure, not less. Inside Visma, that work sits with the Competence Centres, not the senior engineers hired to build product. Same legal space, same data protection standards, no contract complexity from sourcing outside the bloc.

What AI hasn't changed: domain knowledge

AI writes code faster. It doesn't know why a payroll rule behaves differently in the tenth country, or which migration pattern breaks a legacy ERP integration. That knowledge lives in people who've spent careers in one domain, and it's exactly what the Competence Centres carry alongside the engineering talent.

"Great engineering is scarce, and agents have not changed that," Paradnikas says. "As a founder, you get engineering and domain knowledge that would otherwise take you a decade and a very large budget to assemble. That knowledge you cannot hire quickly. At any price."

The advantage

AI raised the bar on well-run engineering: faster tooling cycles, sharper security demands, more compliance ground to cover. Visma's Competence Centres were built to absorb exactly that, at group scale, years before it had a name.

For companies inside the group: local product, global engineering muscle, and none of the parts of the job nobody signs up for.

‍