Funding: Own budget (3), Public broadcaster / state media (2), Tech company (Google/GNI) (1)
BIRD IA — a targeted fundraising campaign to buy a high-powered on-premise machine so the investigative outlet can run AI models locally against its own archive: a database of hundreds of millions of records on the assets, property, companies, public procurement and EU-funds income of people in power. The stated aim is to flag suspicious data automatically and point its 'investigative scanner' at it.
Established BTA Institute (BTA-I) — new R&D structure partnering with Sofia Tech Park and 15+ academic and tech organisations to develop 20+ AI tools for use across the Bulgarian media sector; planned applications include translation, transcription, subtitling, summarisation, error checking, facial recognition, audio recognition, geolocation, synthetic voice generation, video editing, infographics and archive…
Joined FT Strategies and Google News Initiative AI Launchpad programme to develop reader-facing conversational AI chatbot tools for news consumption
AI avatar co-hosts "AI Ivan" and "AI Elena" deployed on morning news program; synthetic presenters generated from real anchors to deliver scripted news segments
AI-generated audio versions of articles using text-to-speech technology, enabling subscribers to listen to written content; first Bulgarian outlet to develop this capability