Signal #90: Only 5.2% of Romanian Firms Use AI

ChatGPT now sells ads to free users from Lagos to Lima, Claude Duet messages you before you ask, a Polish AI company opened in Bucharest because almost nobody there uses AI yet, a Polish audiobook platform bought a Novi Sad student project, a former OpenAI research chief raised $160M to bring agents to the factory floor, and North Macedonia ships its state app on Tuesday. The next wave of AI money is chasing the people who haven't started.

Good afternoon friends.

For two years the AI story was about who got there first. This week the money turned toward the people who are last: free users in new countries, companies that never bought a chatbot, factories still writing instructions by hand, and governments that skipped a decade of paperwork.

The Bucharest story has the number I keep coming back to. The North Macedonia piece is the one to forward to anyone who works in public administration.

And in the meantime I had my fair share of work doing updates and assisting people on this week’s security incidents, on PHP first, then later NodeJS.

OpenAI switched on ads in 26 more countries on 21 October, taking ChatGPT advertising to 89 markets. Argentina, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa and Ukraine are on the new list. More than 100,000 advertisers are already running campaigns, and the ad business hit a $1 billion annual pace by the end of August.

Look at who sees the ads: Free users and the cheap Go plan, nobody else. Paying subscribers fund the models. Free users in new markets fund the distribution. That is the Google and Facebook playbook again, and it means the cheapest way to reach a first-time AI user in a new country is now a paid slot next to the answer.

The self-serve Ads Manager already supports pay-per-click bidding. Run a small test this month and compare what a click from an AI answer is worth against a click from search. Early data in a new ad channel is always the cheapest data you will ever buy.

B2B customer issues rarely resolve in a single interaction. They move across teams, systems, and account history that most AI tools were never designed to track.

A new briefing paper from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by Front, looks at why AI built for high-volume consumer support creates new coordination gaps when it meets the multi-team reality of B2B service, and what leaders should ask before investing in their next AI tool.

Get the free briefing paper to see the three questions that separate tools built for your environment from tools that will create more work.

Get the Report

Anthropic launched Claude Duet on 21 October, an agent that "reaches out before you ask." It runs on Opus 5.5 in a cloud machine with its own browser, sends a short morning brief, and checks your connected apps every few hours to flag what needs you. It still asks before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes a file.

OpenAI has Dots, Meta has Muse, and now all three big labs sell the same idea: an assistant that doesn't wait for a prompt. That matters more for the late adopters in this issue than for power users. The people who never learned to prompt don't have to anymore. Anthropic says it built Duet for professionals and small business owners with too much to track.

The catch for our region: it's a research preview, by waitlist, for US Pro and Max subscribers only, and its background checks count against your plan limits. Write down now which three apps you'd connect first and which tasks you'd hand over. When it reaches Europe, the people who already know what to delegate will get the most out of it.

Only 5.2% of Romanian companies use any AI at all, against an EU average of 20%. Among large firms it's 21% versus 55%. Warsaw-based Zowie looked at those Eurostat numbers and announced a Bucharest office on 22 October, hiring sales staff for the local market.

Zowie's agents don't just chat. They verify the customer, change the plan or open the ticket, and hand off to a person when company rules say so. CEO Maja Schaefer's read is that most big Romanian banks, telecoms and retailers already have a chatbot, so the pitch is upgrading something that half works. Zowie already runs more than 100 million conversations a year and has raised about $20M from backers including Gradient Ventures and Tiger Global.

A 5.2% adoption rate scares most investors off. Zowie read it as a market nobody has served yet, and it's paying for the move partly from revenue. Founders in Sofia, Belgrade or Prishtina should read their own country's adoption numbers the same way: the lower the number, the shorter the list of competitors.

Poland's Audioteka took a majority stake in Knjigapriča on 20 October. Knjigapriča started in Novi Sad in 2019 as a student project and now has about 400 Serbian and Croatian audiobooks, nearly double a year earlier, many recorded with local narrators. Founder Nenad Iđoški stays on as director. Neither the price nor the stake size was disclosed.

Audioteka, part of Wirtualna Polska, launched in 2008 and runs in Poland, Czechia, Lithuania, Germany and Slovakia, with nearly 40,000 Polish titles. Its operations director called the Balkans a natural next step, and Croatia comes next. With Zowie in Bucharest the same week, that's two Polish companies moving south in a few days. Polish founders have started treating the rest of the region as their home market.

For a Balkan founder, that changes the exit map. The nearest serious buyer for a local-language product may now sit in Warsaw, not London or Berlin, and it already knows how to run a small-language catalogue. Put a few Polish names on your list this quarter.

Bob McGrew ran research at OpenAI until 2024. On 20 October his new company, Arda, raised a $160M Series A at a $1.5B valuation, co-led by Altimeter, Accel and Khosla. Arda takes a product's CAD files and turns them into an assembly line: the order of steps, the work instructions, the layout of each station. McGrew says it does for manufacturing engineers "what Claude or Cursor does for programmers."

Its first customer is Anduril, which says basic work instructions dropped from 10 hours to 15 minutes. That customer is having a good month too: Anduril staff are selling shares at a price that values the company around $90B, up from $61B in May. Factories were among the last places software reached, and investors are now paying a premium to get there first. Even Altimeter's partner admitted "the price is steep today."

Czech, Slovak, Polish and Serbian plants assemble parts for German carmakers every day. The engineers in those plants are exactly who a tool like this is built for. The first local company to sell it to them won't need a $160M round to get started.

On 28 October, North Macedonia's Ministry of Digital Transformation launches m.Uslugi, a free app with your ID card, driving licence and three other services. Two years ago the national portal offered 120 e-services to 110,000 users. Minister Stefan Andonovski told Skopje's Startup Revolution Summit it now runs 352 services for 266,000.

The interesting part is the model. Andonovski said Ukraine's Diia app convinced him a small country shouldn't build 20 or 30 separate government apps. So it's one app, one login, and a wallet that will add health data and payments later, with Vezilka, a €6M national AI factory antenna, working on Macedonian-language models alongside it. His line: "Digitalization is the one area where you can leapfrog regardless of roads, budget, or history."

There's a catch. Institutions still have to update their rules before a clerk accepts the phone version instead of the plastic card. Watch the first month: if a Skopje bank branch accepts the digital ID without an argument, the rest of the Western Balkans will copy this fast. Kosovo, Albania, this one's for you.

Productivity: Docs Live writes structured Google Docs from your voice. Google rolled it out on Android and iOS on 21 October. You talk, it drafts the project update or proposal, pulling context from your Gmail, Chat and Drive. It's on by default for Workspace Business and Enterprise plans plus Google AI Pro and Ultra, so dictate your next meeting recap on the walk back from the meeting. (Google)

Marketing: Gemini picked up small-business skills. Paste your website URL and Gemini redesigns the landing page, generates on-brand campaign visuals, and turns receipts and spreadsheets into finance models. It connects to Shopify, Canva, Wix and Xero. Google says it reaches all Gemini app users globally in the coming days, so check your app this week. (Deccan Herald)

Design: Lovable apps can now stay in the EU. Lovable's October enterprise roundup bundles EU inference, deploys into your own AWS or Azure account, an API and audit-log exports. Teams in regulated sectors that blocked AI-built internal tools over data residency just lost their main objection. Send it to whoever owns compliance. (Lovable)

Dev: GitHub's package firewall stops bad npm installs. Now in public preview, it sits between your coding agents, CI hosts and the npm registry, checks each install against the Advisory Database and can hold fresh releases in a cooldown period. Enterprise Cloud only, free during preview. Agents install packages without blinking, so switch this on before one pulls something nasty. (GitHub)

Next edition soon,
Çelik