In the last two weeks, Career Daily News published some of its largest projects dedicated to artificial intelligence and its impact on professions such as PR, HR and Marketing(see the materials after clicking on the respective profession). Over 100 experts shared their views in a series of materials totaling over 80 pages.

Now it's time for the people who make strategic decisions.

We are starting a new series with leading CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, with this time the question being just one:

How do you think the world, and specifically business, will look in the next two to three years in the era of increasingly developing artificial intelligence?

The first comments can already be read in Career Daily News, and soon expect more perspectives from the people who today define the direction of business:

Iliya Krustev (CEO at A Data Pro)

„Predicting how the world will look in two to three years today is extremely difficult. The speed of change is such that technologies that seemed experimental just a year ago are now being implemented in real business processes.

What we can say for sure is that artificial intelligence will not just improve the existing work model. It will change the model itself. A large part of repetitive activities, including in intellectual labor, will be performed by AI systems and agents. This will lead to a huge increase in productivity, but also to serious restructuring of the labor market. Entire professions will not necessarily disappear overnight, but specific functions will vanish, roles will change, and the value of people who can formulate the right problems, make decisions, and take responsibility for them will increase.

The structure of business will also change. We will see much smaller teams that, with the help of AI, achieve scales that previously required hundreds of people. Companies close to the idea of “one-person unicorns” are likely to emerge. At the same time, the concentration of computing power, data, chips, cloud infrastructure, and energy may create new oligopolies. Large tech companies already have resources comparable to the economies of entire countries, and they will increasingly be not only economic but also geopolitical factors.

Therefore, the next two to three years will not just be a period of technological adaptation. They will be a period in which economic power, competitive advantages, and influence will be redistributed. The difference will not be between companies that use AI and those that do not formally use it, but between organizations that have changed their processes and business models around it, and those that have merely added another tool.

For business, the biggest risk is no longer making a wrong first step, but not starting the transformation in time. And for countries, the question is even greater: whether they will build the necessary skills, infrastructure, energy security, and regulatory environment, or will remain merely consumers of technologies created and controlled elsewhere.“

Implementing AI without a strategy is like buying a plane without a pilot

 

Maria Mincheva (Vice Chairperson of the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce)

„In two to three years, we will probably ask less frequently whether a company uses artificial intelligence. The more important question will be what it uses it for and what results it achieves. AI will gradually be embedded in products, services, and daily work processes – from information analysis and communication with clients to production planning and resource management. In many cases, decisions will be able to be prepared faster, and smaller teams will achieve results that today require more people and time.

The great divide will likely not be between humans and artificial intelligence, but between organizations that manage to turn it into higher productivity, better products, and higher quality work, and those that remain at the level of individual experiments.

The world will be filled with even more content, data, and automatically generated proposals. Therefore, access to information itself may gradually cease to be a competitive advantage. The ability to ask the right question, recognize credible information, and assess how it should be used will become more important. The more content machines create, the more valuable trust, authenticity, and clear human responsibility will likely become.

Bulgarian enterprises are already experiencing a serious shortage of personnel, and demographic trends give reason to expect that this will deepen. In this sense, our main problem is rather not that AI will leave people unemployed.

At the same time, we need to increase productivity if we want our economy to be competitive and incomes to grow sustainably. This is where one of the biggest opportunities may lie. AI could take on some of the administrative and repetitive tasks, shorten the time for processing information, assist in planning, and free people for work that requires experience and professional judgment. This does not only apply to technology companies. We will likely see changes in manufacturing, trade, transport, tourism, and practically all services.

However, data shows that Bulgarian business is moving at different speeds. In a blitz survey by the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce from 2023, 26.1% of participating enterprises stated that they use AI, while 27.5% planned investments in the next three years. According to official data from the National Statistical Institute, by 2025, 8.5% of enterprises will use AI technologies, with the share reaching 26.2% among large companies. The studies have different scopes and cannot be directly compared, but they outline a familiar picture: there is interest, but real and systematic implementation proves to be the more difficult part.

From the work of the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and our Center for Innovation, International Trade, Technological Transformation, and Analysis – CINTA, with enterprises, we see that the obstacles are not only financial. There is a lack of skills, clear internal rules, and confidence in how to use the technology securely. There are also concerns among employees. If management does not explain what is changing, why it is changing, and how this may affect people, resistance is completely understandable.

We do not expect entire professions to disappear en masse in the next two to three years. It is more likely that specific tasks will change, along with the requirements for people. Some activities will be automated, and in some purely executive roles, the need for human labor may decrease. On the other hand, professionals who know their work well, can ask the right questions, and can verify the results will likely become more valuable. AI can provide a convincingly sounding but factually incorrect answer. Therefore, professional expertise should not become redundant – on the contrary, we expect its importance to grow.

Of course, technology alone cannot solve the problem of low productivity. If we add it to a poorly organized process, we will likely start doing ineffective work faster. The task of leaders is to determine where AI can actually create value and only then choose the specific tool. This is primarily a management change, not just a purchase of new software.

There is also a risk of widening the gap between companies that can invest in technologies, data, and skills, and those that do not have such capacity. Small and medium-sized enterprises and companies outside major economic centers are more vulnerable, where access to specialists, training, and technological partners is often more limited. They need practical support, consultations, and accessible financing, without being burdened with new complex procedures.

Alongside technological change, business must also adapt to the European regulatory framework. From August 2, 2026, the main part of the Artificial Intelligence Act will begin to be applied. Protecting fundamental rights, data, and security is necessary, but enterprises need clear and applicable guidelines. The challenge for Europe is to find a balance that manages real risks without unnecessarily limiting the ability of its own companies to develop and implement innovations.

The state could also be not only a regulator but an active consumer of new technologies. Under the right conditions, AI can contribute to faster administrative services and reduce some of the burden on citizens and businesses.

Ultimately, AI can analyze information, propose solutions, and accelerate work, but it cannot take responsibility for the consequences. That remains with the people who manage the business. Therefore, one of the most important qualities of a leader in the coming years will likely be not just to use new technologies, but to assess where they create real value, where they hide risks, and when human judgment should have the final word.“

The Power of Story: When HR, PR, Marketing, and Employer Branding Speak Together

 

Andrey Bachvarov, Managing Partner, Artemis Capital Partners

„The next few years will be a period of AI reckoning – the entry of artificial intelligence has already happened, huge investments have poured into leading companies: SpaceX, OpenAI with a record $122 billion at a valuation of $852 billion, Anthropic with $65 billion, xAI with $20 billion, and in defense Anduril with $5 billion and the European Helsing with $1.8 billion.

It remains to be seen whether these amounts will be justified and whether betting trillions on AI will bring the promised mountains of gold. You saw what happened shortly after the debut of SpaceX, we heard what Elon Musk himself said about money in the next 10 years.

Value is shifting from models to data and the right to access them. The competition between models is happening at hyper-speed, and soon there will be little difference, for example, between the first and the third, especially after China's intervention in this race.

What cannot be copied is the proprietary data flow, the embedded process, and regulatory trust. The winner will not be the one with the strongest model, but the one who has permission to work with sensitive data and has proven that they can do so securely.

In defense, this is no longer a theory. I work daily with European companies in satellite communications, unmanned systems, and intelligence technologies – there AI is not implemented as a productive tool “in the cloud,” but as part of systems for targeting, processing sensor data, and supporting decisions under incomplete information and time pressure.

The requirements are fundamentally different: the model often needs to work locally, at the edge of the network, often without connection, and must function in an environment where one mistake is not a lost client, but a lost life.

It is no coincidence that these companies attract capital of such scale – Helsing is already valued at $18 billion, and Anduril at around $61 billion. At the same time, we have seen that the speed of the “sensor – analysis – decision” cycle has become a fundamental competitive advantage on the battlefield.

The same logic is transferred to civilian business.

From here comes the most underestimated change for top management: working with classified and sensitive information.

More and more leaders in defense, critical infrastructure, energy, and finance will need to be able to use AI tools in isolated, air-gapped environments — systems without internet connection, with locally hosted models, strict access control, and full traceability of every request.

This is not an IT question that is delegated downwards. The manager who can ask the right question to a secure system and read the answer critically will have a significant advantage over someone who waits for a summary from someone else.

The opposite is also true: the most common security breach in the coming years will not be a hacker attack, but an executive who copies a sensitive document into a public chatbot because it is faster and makes them look smarter in front of themselves, their investors, and their subordinates.

Organizations will tighten up. We will not see mass layoffs – we are already seeing a de facto hiring freeze, which is a particular problem for young professionals just entering the market.

One strong specialist with good tools already covers the work of three. This completely changes the service economy, where the model until now was “hours per person” – and this was one of the main reasons we sold our company Anthill in 2025.

Technological sovereignty is becoming an economic category, not an ideological one.

Clients are already asking where their data is processed, who owns the hardware, and who has access to the weights of the model. This creates a real market for European solutions that just three years ago seemed expensive and unnecessary.

That’s why Mistral is negotiating its European expansion with Microsoft, and capital is already seeking a European address – from Helsing to the Finnish ICEYE, which raised 450 million euros.

And finally – for the competitive advantage.

In two years, “we use AI” will sound like “we have a website.” The difference will come from access, trust, and judgment under incomplete information.

Analysis is already done in hours instead of weeks, but who will put their signature and reputation on it – and in the case of classified information, their freedom – remains entirely a human question.

My forecast for 2028: fewer companies, greater differences between them, and significantly higher prices for good judgment.“

 

Albena Georgieva (CEO of Billa Bulgaria)

„If I have to imagine the world in 2–3 years, I don’t think it will be as different as we are sometimes led to believe. It will be faster, more automated, and probably much more demanding of business. But basic human needs will not change at the speed at which technologies change.

Food trade is a good example. It is one of the foundations of any society and economy. For millennia, the quality of life has depended on something very simple – having access to good, fresh, and quality food at a price you can afford. That’s why I believe our sector will change a lot, but it will not change abruptly and fundamentally and that is actually a good thing.

Of course, artificial intelligence opens up huge opportunities. In retail, it can help us forecast demand more accurately, manage inventory better, reduce food waste, optimize logistics and energy consumption, free our people from repetitive administrative tasks, and make faster decisions based on vast amounts of information.

For me, however, one of the most interesting opportunities is another: AI can make big business more precise in small details.
When you manage hundreds of stores, thousands of employees, and a huge assortment, scale naturally creates more complex problems to solve. When technology helps us with them, we can pay more attention to the things that the customer actually feels – whether their favorite product is on the shelf, whether the fruits and vegetables are fresh enough, how long they wait, whether they receive good service.

And here, I think, is the important boundary. We should not use artificial intelligence to distance people from business, but to remove unnecessary burden from them.

This applies to the labor market as well. Some activities will certainly disappear or change significantly. Others will emerge. The big question for employers will not just be how many positions we can automate, but how quickly we can help our people acquire new skills. Because technology can increase productivity, but trust, responsibility, judgment, and customer relations remain human qualities.

We cannot trust artificial intelligence to test the taste of products under our own brands, can we?

In our business, the role of the human is particularly clear. Behind a cheese on the shelf, there is much more than an algorithm. There is a farmer who produced the milk. There are people who processed it, transported it, and checked it. There is an employee who arranged it in the store. And finally, there is a person who chooses it from dozens of other cheeses for their family.

One day technologies may change almost every step along this path. And we should not be afraid of them, because a business that refuses to change will sooner or later lose its competitiveness. But I believe that the best companies will not be those that automate the most, but those that use technologies most wisely, to give their people more opportunities to learn, grow, and interact with other people – clients, colleagues, and partners.

AI will change our tools, our processes, and probably many professions, but it will not change our core mission – to provide good, fresh, and affordable food to people. And I believe that this mission will remain our most reliable guide in an increasingly fast-changing world.“

 

Ivaylo Slavov (Executive Director and Member of the Board of Directors of Wiser Technology § Executive Director and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Elevate)

 

"In the last two years, we have mainly talked about the opportunities of artificial intelligence. In the next two to three years, the focus will be on results.
AI will become a natural part of business processes. The question will no longer be whether a company uses it, but what real value it creates with it - higher productivity, lower costs, faster processes, or more rational business decisions.
We will see more and more teams where people and AI agents work together. Routine activities will be automated, and the value of people will increasingly come from expertise, understanding of the business, critical assessment, and responsibility for the final result.
The most successful will be the companies that manage to turn AI into better products, more efficient processes, and measurable business results. Access to technology itself will not be a competitive advantage."

 

Mag. Pharm. Liliya Karamancheva – Dobreva (Manager of Queisser Pharma Bulgaria, Doppelherz)

„In the next 2–3 years, artificial intelligence will seriously change the way companies analyze information, plan, communicate with their clients, and manage daily processes. Business will become faster, more precise, and more personalized. Organizations that can wisely integrate AI will have a significant competitive advantage – they will make decisions faster, free their people from routine tasks, and direct more resources towards strategy, innovation, and development.

For me, AI is an exceptional assistant and a high-speed tool to reach our goals faster. But it is also a mirror of the capabilities of the person using it. The same tool can create enormous value or convincingly reproduce a mistake. Therefore, critical thinking, depth of knowledge, and verification will become even more important.

Many expert functions related to data processing and analysis will be strongly supported by AI. But the human must remain the one who understands the context, verifies the information, assesses the risk, and makes the decision. Especially in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors, technological speed should never come at the expense of accuracy, ethics, and responsibility towards people.

I do not believe that human responsibility and leadership power will be displaced anytime soon. On the contrary – the more powerful the tools become, the greater the need for decisive leaders who can set a clear direction, establish boundaries, and take responsibility for the consequences.

The greatest opportunity is for AI to free humans from a significant part of the routine and give them more time and conditions to be Creators – to generate ideas, build relationships, develop people, and find solutions that bring not only efficiency but also meaning. It is precisely the businesses that combine technological speed with human judgment and decisiveness, professional intuition, and empathy that I believe will remain sustainable in the tomorrow.“

Peter Stoilov (Executive Director of Nestle Bulgaria)

„If a decade ago digitalization was a competitive advantage, in the next 2-3 years the ability to work with artificial intelligence will become a basic requirement, an imperative. In the dynamics of our contemporary world, this period is sufficient for AI to penetrate practically all age groups and areas of life – from education, where it will serve as a daily learning aid, to supporting older people as a personal assistant and conversational partner. In business, artificial intelligence will be fully integrated into daily operations and will become an integral part of every function – from marketing, sales, and customer service to HR, finance, and supply chain management. Just like mastering a foreign language or digital literacy today, the ability to work effectively with AI will be a prerequisite for even basic positions. The most visible change will be speed. Processes that today take hours or days will be completed in minutes. This will free people from routine tasks and allow them to focus on areas where human qualities remain irreplaceable – creativity, critical thinking, empathy, and strategic decision-making. I am convinced that the companies that manage to integrate AI into their culture and way of working the fastest will be the leaders of the next business decade.“

 

Elena Dretcheva  (Managing Director at Konica Minolta)

„I think that in the next 2–3 years we will witness not just a technological change, but a fundamental change in our very understanding of work, leadership, and value.

In the 27 years I have been part of the technology sector, I have seen various waves of transformation. Almost every one of them has been met with both fear and enormous expectations. Artificial intelligence is no exception. The difference is that this time the speed of change is much greater, and the impact will not remain limited to technology companies – it will affect practically every business and every profession.

But for me, the most important question is not “What will AI do?”.

The more important question is: “What will we do with AI?”

Because technology itself does not determine the future. It is determined by the choices we make as leaders – where we use AI, how we prepare our people, what competencies we develop, and what culture we create in our organizations.

In the coming years, I expect several very clear changes.

First, AI will change the way we do our work. I do not believe that the conversation should only be about which professions will disappear. The more significant question is how almost every profession will be changed. Companies that manage to integrate AI into their daily processes will be able to be significantly faster, more productive, and more competitive.

Therefore, in the future, people will not simply compete against AI. People who know how to work with AI will compete against those who do not. And companies that have changed their way of working will compete against those that still operate under the old model.

Second, people and AI agents will increasingly work as one team. Organizations will gradually begin to think not only about what people to attract but also about what AI agents to use for different roles and processes.

This poses a very interesting question for leaders: How do you manage an organization where part of the “team” is no longer human?

Here, I believe, one of the most important management competencies of the next decade will emerge – the ability to determine what needs to be automated, what to leave to humans, and how to combine the two so that the result is better than what each could achieve alone.

Third, the more powerful AI becomes, the more valuable true human qualities will be.

This at first glance seems like a paradox, but I believe that this is how business will develop. When information, analysis, and part of expertise become more accessible through AI, the competitive advantage of humans will lie in things that are much harder to automate – emotional intelligence, critical thinking, creativity, leadership, empathy, the ability to inspire, and build trust.

In sales, leadership, and customer service, the human connection will not become less important. It will become more valuable precisely because a larger part of the world around us will be automated.

And fourth, I believe we will see a clear division between two types of companies – those that manage the transformation and those that become its victims.

Winners will not necessarily be organizations with the largest technology budgets or the most AI tools. They will be those who have the courage to change their way of working, to experiment, and most importantly – to develop their people in parallel with technologies.

My philosophy has always been simple: technology should serve people, not people serve technology.

AI is an extremely powerful tool and will open up opportunities that today we may not even be able to fully foresee. But I believe that the most successful companies will not be those that simply use the most AI. They will be those that manage to combine the best of technologies with the best of humanity.

Therefore, for me, the most important investment in the coming years will not be just in AI.

It will be in the ability of people to learn.

In education, adaptability, curiosity, and faith in the potential of our teams to develop.

Because in a world where technology changes almost daily, perhaps the most valuable competitive advantage will be a very human quality:

the ability to continuously learn and change.“

 

Dimitar Galabov (CEO at Sutherland Global)

„I believe that the next 2-3 years will be the period of the fastest business transformation since the beginning of the internet era. I believe that artificial intelligence will move from a fragmented tool for performing certain activities and processes to the core infrastructure of every developed organization. AI has already fundamentally changed the way we work, taking on a large part of routine and administrative tasks and activities, but for me, the big change comes from the ability to process incomparably larger volumes of information and to consider multiple alternatives simultaneously, making business decisions increasingly accurate, justified, and predictable.

There is also a less obvious but perhaps more important effect - AI does not just perform assigned tasks, it greatly expands capabilities, combining ideas and data in ways that would take a person incomparably more time, thus acting as a true accelerator of innovation, opening horizons that just a few years ago seemed a distant future. This will inevitably lead to a rapid emergence of new and previously unknown products and services.

I believe we will continue to witness a redistribution, not a disappearance of jobs - routine tasks will be increasingly automated, while judgment, decisions, and human connection will become more valued. Companies that combine these technological capabilities with a strong culture and trust in their teams will genuinely benefit from this wave - not just by reducing costs, but through new products and work models.

This transformation will not remain only at the business level - it will also change the way we consume information, make decisions, and communicate with each other, and our ability to distinguish what is valuable and credible will become a key skill for everyone, not just for business leaders.”

 

Elena Marinova (Entrepreneur, Investor, and Philanthropist)

''AI is and is not “hype”.

It is “hype”: we will see some cooling of valuations of everything related to AI, and more market realism. The truth is that despite the loud “AI first” strategies, in practice AI is still not as deeply embedded in business as it was claimed.

It is not “hype”: today even the most conservative managers use AI as an assistant, expert, and consultant. And when something enters high on the management agenda, it also enters at the operational level.

The end of AI euphoria is approaching and a new wave of AI euphoria: more pressure for real business application, but also a more realistic confrontation with limitations. The efficiency that AI brings to the top cannot simply be copied at all levels of the organization. Context, complexity, and the human factor matter.

In the next few years, we will see both more widespread implementation of AI and a new sobering – including a rediscovery of the value of the human where AI cannot replace it.“

 

Boyan Mitrakiev (Executive Director of BICA)

„With a renaissance of entrepreneurship, as AI tools will allow small teams of people to be significantly more productive, thus creating prototypes and testing them in the market with a much lower threshold of startup capital. Experts and managers with significant experience in large companies will need fewer junior experts, but this will free (1) on one hand the latter to use AI for risky and large-scale entrepreneurship, and on the other (2), these senior staff will be able to gain experience in a corporate environment and then leave it and create their own business easily and quickly with AI.“

 

Vladislav Milev (CEO at Lev Ins)

„If we look to the future, I believe we will not see “a world governed by AI,” but something more practical and probably deeper. Everything at its core depends on the sector and the willingness of owners to achieve a certain level of digitalization. Business will begin to divide into organizations built around AI, and organizations that simply use AI tools. I would define several directions (naturally related to the insurance business), which in my humble opinion will be the main priorities and future lines.

-       We will move from “AI as an assistant” to “AI as an employee”. The model today is Human → asks AI → receives an answer → Human makes sense and acts

The change will alter the process in the following algorithm:

Human → sets a goal → AI agent plans → executes → checks → reports → Human approves critical decisions or has no relation to the final decision

The change will be fundamental. The main achievement, for me, will be improving customer service, relieving the employee, and optimizing time. I do not think the first major change will be the mass disappearance of physical labor.

The more serious pressure will be on routine labor – constantly repeating tasks with a large volume without requiring high intellectual actions - administration, document processing, standard analyses, reports, presentations, call centers, marketing content, translations, part of accounting operations.

For me, the question will not be: “Will I be replaced by AI?” but rather: “Will I be more productive than a person working with AI?”

-       On the other hand, many smaller but extremely productive companies will emerge - this, in my opinion, will be one of the most serious economic changes.

A company with 100 people + 300 AI agents can, in certain activities, compete with a company with 500–1000 people. I do not claim that these numbers are a universal forecast; this is an illustration of the new operational model. We will have a kind of “digital labor,” whose marginal cost can be much lower than that of human labor. Therefore, the importance of “number of employees” will decrease, while the importance of: intellectual property + data + algorithms + distribution + brand + human expertise will increase. The manager of the future will not necessarily manage 20 people but 5 people + 40 AI agents + 15 automated processes. There will be “AI orchestration” or the ability to organize people, AI models, agents, data, and automated processes simultaneously.

But, in the process, new elements of essence and content will emerge - reputation, human responsibility, the verifiable origin of information, and trust. In insurance, trust is a key element. AI will make information generation cheap, repetitive operations fast and of higher quality, but precisely for this reason, trust will become expensive.

 

-       Cyber + AI will become a common risk. Here, I expect a very serious change. AI will enhance the capabilities of both defense and attackers. We will see more automated attacks. Larger scales for less effort on the part of attackers. But defense will also use AI. For this reason, cybersecurity will gradually cease to be just an “IT function”.

Insurance will be among the most strongly changed industries - Here, I expect particularly large transformation – change in risk analysis, change in preventive measures, and assessment of current and changing risk, etc. Acquisition will begin to work with more data and faster, but the human behind all these changes will remain the main actor. AI does not bear responsibility, and trust in it is still too low.

The insurer will gradually move from: “I receive information → I assess the risk → I determine the premium” to: “I monitor the risk → I predict the change → I warn the client → I reduce the risk → I insure the residual risk”.

This is a huge conceptual change. The insurer will no longer just sell risk transfer. They will sell: Risk Prevention + Risk Intelligence + Risk Transfer.

The policy will gradually turn from a document into a dynamic service for risk management.

In the labor sphere, a new social-labor division will arise.

AI-enabled people against AI-excluded people.

A person with very good professional knowledge + AI can have the productivity of a small team. But a person without sufficient knowledge will not automatically become an expert just because they have AI. Quite the opposite. AI increases the effect of both competence and incompetence. Therefore, fundamental knowledge, critical thinking, and the ability to verify information will become more important, not less important.

And finally, the most interesting thing: “the human will become more expensive” - This is the paradox that I believe is often overlooked. When AI can generate: text, image, contract, analysis, presentation, code, financial model, advertisement, then the very production of content ceases to be a rare resource. The rare resource becomes: judgment, responsibility, trust, and meaning.

Therefore, I do not expect the successful company in 2-3 or even 5 years to be the one with “the most AI”. It is more likely to be the one that has found the right ratio. The ratio between natural and artificial intelligence.

AI will not simply be another tool alongside humans. It will multiply the capabilities of good organizations — and will likely multiply the mistakes of poorly managed ones. That’s why I believe the next 2–3 years will not be so much an AI revolution, but a revolution in the management of companies!”

 

Plamen Dimitrov (Country Manager Coface)

„From the perspective of the financial sector, I do not believe that the next 2-3 years will be a period of mass replacement of people with artificial intelligence. Rather, we will see something much more interesting: a division between companies that manage to integrate AI into their daily work and those that do not.

In insurance, lending, and risk management, speed will become a key competitive advantage. Decisions that today take hours or days will be made in minutes. The analysis of companies, financial reports, and market signals will be automated to a great extent. This will not eliminate the need for experts, but it will change their role. The most valuable will not be the people who gather information, but those who can interpret it and make the right business decisions.

The big change, in my opinion, will not be technological but organizational. Today, most companies use AI as an assistant. In two to three years, successful companies will use it as a real participant in business processes. Part of analyses, customer communication, risk monitoring, and even preparation of management decisions will be performed automatically.

At the same time, trust will become an even more valuable asset. The more decisions are automated, the more important transparency, data quality, and risk control will be. In the financial sector, clients will not choose just the fastest company, but the one that can explain and defend its decisions.

Therefore, I would say that the next years will not belong to the companies with the most artificial intelligence, but to those that manage to combine technologies with human judgment, trust, and responsibility. It is there that true value will be created.“

 

Alexandra Mechkova (CEO at Telerik Academy)

“Today we observe three types of companies in our daily work at Telerik Academy. One completely ignores the new reality and artificial intelligence. The other experiences FOMO (fear of missing out) and only talks about the topic, but has not yet incorporated AI into their strategy and operations. And the third is already actively working on implementing AI in all processes where it can bring value and developing the skills of their people according to their roles and functions. Accordingly, in 2-3 years, there will be two types of businesses - highly competitive and lagging.

It is clear who will be tomorrow's leading and winning companies. Companies that want to get ahead must already look beyond the implementation of individual AI tools and rethink the way they work - from planning the necessary skills and people, through optimizing processes to the necessary changes in the organization itself. The real difference will not be in chaotic access to AI (it is already available to everyone), but in who will manage to turn it into a real advantage, because most likely the competition has already done so.

This also means a serious investment in the development of people. AI skills will be necessary for anyone who wants to remain relevant in the market, and for companies, their development will not just be an HR initiative, but a condition to gain real value and most importantly - to be successful tomorrow in a different, competitive, and dynamic market, where the right investment in AI may be the only path to increased  revenues and profits.

Businesses that are already changing their processes and developing their people will be in a much better position to use AI not just for higher efficiency but for growth at scale in 2–3 years. For the others, the risk is not just  missing a technological trend, the risk is for their existence.”

 

Iva Dimova (Managing Director at Ipsos Bulgaria)

“Artificial intelligence allows a person to free themselves from a large number of tasks and ideally focus on creating added value and unleashing their intellectual potential. How much people will actually take advantage of this opportunity is a completely different question, and my concern is that AI may become yet another dependency, rather than a tool for intellectual development and unleashing human potential.

In business, the role of AI is undoubtedly transformative. In the field I work in, that of marketing research, we are already observing clear signs of this change. But if the question is whether AI will make our work meaningless and whether it will replace the experienced researcher, my answer is a categorical no. Artificial intelligence achieves a scale that is unimaginable for human capabilities, but it cannot replace the creativity, critical thinking, and depth that human intelligence can add. So, the real positive change for me lies in the collaboration between artificial and natural intelligence.

What do we actually see as an effect of the implementation of AI? Studies that used to take weeks or months can now be realized in days, even hours. The speed and ability to work on a large scale are undoubtedly among the greatest advantages regarding research. Automations such as generating questionnaires, moderating large samples, coding open-ended questions, preliminary analyses lead to significantly shorter deadlines and optimized budgets for standard projects. Ipsos has a platform that already allows achieving large online samples literally in a few hours, and the entire cycle of standard projects can happen within 48 hours. This platform allows the client to manage their projects without the involvement of a researcher, which I believe will become increasingly common. Providing quick data is a trend that will increasingly prevail, especially with the advent of synthetic data, which, although they do not replace real respondents, will have their application when there is a need for quick preliminary testing of concepts, optimization of questionnaires, etc. However, there will also be a reverse trend – with the use of synthetic data, the role of real respondents will also be strengthened. The issue of quality has always been paramount in research, but in the era of artificial intelligence, its importance will increase even more, and competition will already be based on how technological provision allows an agency to reach real people. Here, the role of the researcher will be crucial, who will have the responsible task of validating the insights obtained.

My prediction is that only companies that manage to combine AI automation with human consulting expertise will benefit from these changes, because the role of agencies will be to offer speed, but not at the expense of quality, scale, but not at the expense of depth, to combine data from different sources, to provide context, to turn all this into valuable insights and applicable recommendations. And the researcher will need to be closer to the client, to know the category, the cultural context, the human motivation, to become a trusted consultant. Only in this way will research continue to create real added value and reinforce its role as a strategic partner for business.”

 

 

Vladimir Rashev (Managing Partner at Balkan Services)

„Following the speed at which technology is developing and from what I observe as a trend for the implementation of AI, there is no unequivocal answer to the question.

Many companies are rapidly introducing artificial intelligence and want this to happen quickly, skipping important steps such as the reliability and applicability of data. This leads to the creation of an unstable foundation on which management decisions are often made,  and to risks for the business.

I want to be optimistic and say that in three years in Bulgaria we will have significant business growth, much more value for clients, and much faster processes after the introduction of artificial intelligence. For this to happen, we must realize now that successful use of artificial intelligence begins not only with technology but also with reliable data, clear responsibility for them, and well-structured processes. This is the primary responsibility of management and is nothing we do not know, but often gets overlooked in the name of speed.

Organizations that will lead in the coming years will not necessarily be those with the most developed AI or the most tools implemented. The advantage will go to companies that best understand where human judgment is irreplaceable, what data they should rely on, and how to combine it with the capabilities of AI.

True competitive advantage will come from the correct distribution of roles: where humans are better than AI, where AI complements them, where it is faster and more efficient than a human, and how people, teams, and technologies work together as one system.“