On Saturday, October 10th, I spent the day in Bucharest as a mentor at the Business Forward bootcamp, working face to face with Romanian small and medium-sized companies on how to put AI to work in their own business.
Business Forward is a free national accelerator for Romanian SMEs with a turnover between 1 and 5 million euros, run by Social Innovation Solutions together with Raiffeisen Bank. More than 300 companies signed up, over 100 of them went through learning modules from the Harvard Business School AI Institute, and 25 were selected for the Advanced Program. The bootcamp is where those 25 companies sit down with the program's lead experts and mentors.
Five sessions, ninety minutes each
My part was mentoring: five sessions of 90 minutes each with the participating companies. That format is the opposite of a keynote. There are no slides and no general talk about where AI is going. You sit at a table with the people who run the business, look at how their work actually gets done, and help them shape their Technology Transformation Plan, the document each company is building during the program and the one that decides who competes for the grants.
"If you can explain a task to another human, and that human can do it without you, then that task is a great candidate for an AI agent."
That is the rule I keep coming back to, and it works especially well with SMEs. A small company doesn't need an AI strategy deck. It needs to find the two or three repetitive tasks that eat its people's days, and start there.
What comes next
The companies keep working on their plans with their mentors until mid-November. The best plans then go to a final selection, and four of them can receive grants from a total of 1,000,000 lei, with the final event planned for January 2027.
Thanks to Social Innovation Solutions and Raiffeisen Bank for inviting me to mentor in the program, and to the companies for being so open about how they work. That openness is what makes a 90-minute session useful.