“Success is what you leave behind”: Ognian Trajanov on entrepreneurship, AI, and innovation

A visionary for whom technology and education are an integral cause, a man who builds bridges between business, science, and the future of young people – Ognian Trajanov is the owner and CEO of TechnoLogica, one of the first private IT companies in Bulgaria. His role extends far beyond corporate leadership.

Ognian Trayanov works actively to promote sustainable development and support youth initiatives and has been contributing to the development of the IT sector for years. He has served two terms as chairman of the UN BMGD and two terms as head of the Bulgarian Association for Information Technologies (BAIT). He is currently chairman of the BAIT Supervisory Board.

We spoke with him on the eve of the international conference iN Sofia 2025, which will be held on October 31 at the Hilton Hotel in Sofia. During the event, Ognian Trajanov will participate in a visionary conversation with Georgi Georgiev (Simobotics).

Don't miss out on registering for the visionary panel at the iN Sofia 2025 international conference. The full program of the event can be viewed here.

Mr. Trajanov, Technologica was founded at the dawn of the transition, and you have witnessed the evolution of the Bulgarian IT industry from its early stages to the present day. How has the nature of technological entrepreneurship changed over the years?

The Bulgarian IT industry began long before the changes. The changes provided an exceptional opportunity for IT entrepreneurship, opening up not just niches, but a vast field. Most of us IT entrepreneurs were previously research assistants. We left the institutes with knowledge, but we had no experience, no funding, and there was even no demand. We had to prove the benefits of information technology. We started with hardware, partnerships with foreign manufacturers, and some of the big brands brought management know-how.

Different types of entrepreneurs can be distinguished – opportunists, replicators/copiers, innovators, and entrepreneurs with a cause. During this period – the beginning of the transition – most entrepreneurs were forced into it, and most of them remained at that level – trading in hardware. An entrepreneur with a cause is not just a business owner, but a person who has an idea that they are fighting for and has staked everything on realizing it. We, the entrepreneurs with a cause, wanted to realize our dreams for our own products and solutions. We created a market and gained trust, proving that the dedication of Bulgarian IT entrepreneurs to the success of the project in Bulgaria provides a greater guarantee than the respected international brand.

We opened the doors for the next generation of entrepreneurs. And again, among them there were those whose main goal was the easier way to make money with little added value, and others who wanted to realize their ideas in a business with high added value, knowing that it would take more time and effort. The former rushed into the outsourcing business to sell the labor of IT specialists to foreign companies, while the latter, whose typical representatives we will meet at the iN Sofia event, focused on creating their own products and solutions.

The time has come for a new generation of IT entrepreneurs. They have the chance to embark on their journey in a much more favorable environment with interested investors, entrepreneurs who are ready to help, and the state's awareness of the need to support start-ups.

Artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction. From the perspective of someone who has been building software solutions for decades, is this an evolution or a revolution? How does it change the rules of the game?

From the perspective of someone who has been working in the field of artificial intelligence since the 1980s, I would say that its development illustrates Hegel's idea that "quantitative accumulations lead to qualitative changes." Neural networks and machine learning are terms from the middle of the last century. Today, the necessary conditions are in place for the realization of something that has long been theoretically mapped out, namely computing power and oceans of data in digital form. It is understandable that artificial intelligence is shaking up the world. It is significant how free access to ChatGPT has gained the attention, respect, and interest of billions in artificial intelligence, after years of each of them using it in their daily lives and even having a device with artificial intelligence in some form in their pocket.

Like any generally transformative technology or innovation, AI inspires both enthusiasm and fear. The challenges are many: copyright in the various arts, the accessibility of deepfakes of famous people, which is also observed in Bulgaria, and the rapid generation of changing, hard-to-recognize malicious program code, and the reliability of autonomous weapons, etc.

But gradually, regulations and solutions are being found. The risk of generated, plausible, and well-received fictional content being multiplied in a chain by subsequent search engines and AI, turning it into "popular truth," is addressed by labeling it "generated by AI." The simplest example is AI that helps check whether homework assignments have been generated by AI.

Every industrial revolution has been associated with fears of job losses. But in fact, it has always been about freeing people from hard and unproductive work and helping them to realize their potential in a lighter and more creative way. And the displacement of white-collar workers from their jobs by AI is not the first encroachment on them – software robots for automating work processes (RPA) have been doing this successfully for years. What is new is that through AI, humanity will not only have assistants to relieve it of routine work, but also a partner for creativity and scientific research. Years ago, I wrote on my LinkedIn homepage: "We should not be afraid of new technologies. The shortcomings of new technologies will be eliminated by newer technologies. AI and robots are not oppressors, they are our liberators."

AI and 3D modeling: How do you see the synergy between artificial intelligence and 3D design? Do you expect AI to take over a large part of routine engineering design, freeing up human resources for creativity and innovation?

This is already a reality. Since the beginning of the century, the engineering design and manufacturing systems we use to support Bulgarian engineers have implemented something I dreamed of and was the subject of my dissertation – "Application of A methods for recognizing the technological characteristics of machine-building parts." . This is an important element for the relationship between designers and technologists, unification, and optimization. Designers can use built-in AI to solve more complex tasks related to the optimization of the products and parts they design. An easy-to-understand example is suggesting the optimal number and type of spokes for a designed wheel based on the requirements for it.

Your DiTra center works directly with Bulgarian industry. Which sectors in Bulgaria are the fastest to adopt 3D printing, scanning, and reverse engineering technologies, and where do you see the greatest potential for radically increasing competitiveness through these activities?

Many sectors, and not only in industry. Even in medicine and art.

Rapid prototyping was the first area in which we started using 3D printing back in 1997. Various tasks, such as testing how comfortable to hold and resistant to sand on the beach newly designed bottles are. Or to produce extremely quickly the box of a new cash register that is going to an exhibition. Since then, we and our customers have come a long way in the development of these technologies. Repair, restoration, or modernization after scanning is an approach that ranges from replacing a part of a personal item or detail to replacing the furnishings of a train car. Today, the new wave in 3D printing is the production of parts for drones.

The great potential lies in personalization – a key feature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The transition from manufacturing for an anonymous customer to meeting the specific requirements of a particular customer. Additive manufacturing (3D printing) eliminates the need for preparatory processes and their material support, enabling simultaneous printing of assembled units, speed, and flexibility. Personalization is already being used, expected, and demanded.

Young entrepreneurs today are growing up in a world of venture capital, unicorns, and exit strategies. You built an extremely successful company in a different era. What from your approach would you recommend to today's generation, and what would you warn them to be careful about?

In the world you describe, customers are impersonal investors who put money in and want money back. This provides resources but does not provide freedom.

I am an entrepreneur who takes moderate risks and focuses on stability and the team, not on scale, and I would warn them: don't invest all your resources to the end and don't take full advantage of the temptations offered by the market in good times by achieving rapid quantitative growth that only corresponds to a booming economic environment. Don't put all your eggs in one basket; ensure diversification.

It is natural to seek success in competition with your peers. But it is primitive to judge how successful a person is by their wealth. Even in a developed market economy, where remuneration and profit show how useful you have been to customers with your work and creativity, this cannot be a decisive criterion. And in times when, under the pretext of dealing with pandemics and military threats, debts are being accumulated for future generations, money has an increasingly virtual value.

On the path to maturity, you understand that success is objectified through the assessment of those who understand the subject matter (experts, colleagues, competitors, customers) and are not subjective (they are not dependent on you, they are not flatterers).

Success is the achievement of a lofty goal that was a challenge for you, and the reward is the motivation and resources for the next higher goal. But when you reach maturity, having achieved a number of goals, set new ones, and thus come a long way in pursuing goals, you have grown as a person, you realize that the meaning of your existence is what you have created and left behind. These are the deeds with which you have made the world a little better, the next generations in which you have invested and which will continue to change it for the better.

Profit and money are recognition, but they also bring expectations of you and commitments to society. Profit and the financial resources it generates are incentives from society to raise your gaze and move towards new, higher goals and causes, investing the resources you manage to achieve them.

Do you see a fundamental change in how value is created in the economy? How can we raise the level of added value generated in Bulgaria?

Creating high added value is linked to innovation. We need to build an ecosystem for innovation. A significant obstacle to achieving this is the lack of an innovation market – an environment for buying, selling, or finding co-investors for finished and packaged products from the intermediate phases of the innovation process (ideas, technical solutions, patents, prototypes, project documentation, etc.). Innovation goes through different phases. In Bulgaria, it is very difficult for it to be pushed forward independently from the person who generated the idea to its market realization. For 14 years now, I have been sharing my concept for this important element of building an ecosystem for innovation and looking for like-minded people. I am not giving up; for me, this is a cause. I have realized one of my causes – the first STEM center, TechnoMagicLand.

Other necessary measures:

• Intelligent specialization without blurring dozens of priority areas within it. It should not be unfocused and isolated – unknown, without sufficient discussion, without consensus and unity of society around it. One aspect of specialisation should be the training of human resources, a "task" for the education system;
• Amendments to the Public Procurement Act and the announcement of tenders for products and services with great potential that do not yet exist on the market;
• Freeing pension companies from restrictions on investing in shares of Bulgarian companies;
• Change in the regulatory framework for accounting for investments in innovation development.

If you had to advise the young Ognyan Trayanov, who is starting his entrepreneurial journey today, in which direction would you guide him? Which sectors, technologies, or business models hold the greatest potential for the next 20 years?
I managed to spark his interest in IT, AI, broad-spectrum engineering education, psychology and philosophy courses, and subsequent specialization in a emerging field with a wide scope for innovation when he was still a teenager.

As areas with great potential for the next 20 years, I would point to: bionics, human sensory enhancers, human-computer interaction, quantum computing, and communications.

In the nearer future, I would focus on: replaceable batteries for vehicles instead of long charging times, AI for monitoring and controlling AI, a new stage in the development of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and, as a sector, healthy living.

Translated with DeepL.