June 20 (SeeNews) - Retail, finance and media industries lead the way in terms of artificial intelligence (AI) implementation in Bulgaria, as over 30 local companies develop solutions for these sectors, a new SeeNews report published on Thursday shows.
Retail sector-focused AI developers are most abundant in the country - 12, followed by finance and media with 11 and 10 companies focused on those fields, respectively, the report Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem in Bulgaria report shows.
The healthcare sector shows the most promise for an increase in the number of AI companies focused on the field. Currently, there are five developers of AI healthcare solutions.
A total of 47 companies develop or use AI in Bulgaria, of which 32 are startups and scaleups, while 15 are national and international corporations. The number of employees in the sector exceeded 3,000 in 2017. AI-related jobs account for 3% of the total developer job market in Bulgaria.
AI developers swung to a combined net profit of 17.2 million euro ($19.4 million) in 2017, on revenue of 206.9 million euro. However, as expected, the startups were still in the red in 2017, posting a combined net loss of 1.2 million euro, on revenue of 10.4 million euro.
Bulgaria's AI startup ecosystem is still at an early stage of its development but has gained a significant momentum in the past few years, as around one-third of all companies researched for the report were established in the 2016-2018 period.
According to local AI company Ontotext, by 2021 there will be at least 10 internationally recognizable Bulgarian companies using AI technology.
The report is available for free download at https://reports.seenews.com.
($ = 0.8854 euro)