Every major advertising platform now claims to be AI-powered. Most are technically correct, but few have addressed the underlying crisis: the steady erosion of consumer trust. For years, brands have responded to diminishing returns by spending more to reach an audience that is increasingly tuning out.
Lachezar Atanasov has spent over a decade analyzing this friction from the inside. He calls it the “Trust Tax” – the hidden, compounding cost of digital skepticism that brands pay every time they try to reach a customer. Now, as he joins the Bulgarian scale-up AdScout as Head of AI Product, he is building the infrastructure he believes will finally eliminate it.
Atanasov’s perspective was refined over twelve years at Google. Most recently, he led the global launch of a GenAI video creation tool developed by Google DeepMind that allows brands to turn simple ideas into finished video in minutes, dramatically reducing the need for traditional production and changing how quickly and often companies can create content.
But for Atanasov, the next leap in commerce will come when we change how we choose and buy our products.
The move to a Bulgarian-founded adtech scale-up is a deliberate bet. We asked him why, and what he’s actually building.
On what “AI-powered advertising” means in 2026
The phrase has been in circulation long enough to lose meaning. Atanasov draws a firm line between what the industry calls AI and what he considers the real frontier.
“The real gap is that ‘AI-powered’ has become a buzzword for basic predictive automation – tools that optimize bids or shuffle pixels but require a human cockpit to manage,” he says. “While the industry is distracted by generative ‘slop’ that consumers are tuning out, the true frontier is Autonomous Orchestration.”
His definition of that is specific: “Building invisible infrastructure that identifies authentic human advocacy and transforms it into high-fidelity assets at scale. The difference is between tools that add more work and a sovereign system that acts as a silent autopilot, deleting operational friction so a brand can finally focus on growth.”
On what he’s creating at AdScout
At AdScout, Atanasov’s role is to close the gap between the platform’s existing advocacy model, which has already demonstrated up to 30% higher engagement than standard influencer advertising and the autonomous infrastructure he believes makes it globally scalable.
“For me, being Head of AI Product at AdScout means moving beyond the generative hype to focus on Applied Orchestration – the art of deleting manual human friction from the growth equation,” he explains. “It isn’t about using AI to replace the human performer, but about using it as an invisible ‘Ghost Producer’ that empowers everyday advocates to scale their truth with professional-grade results.”
The practical target is a 15-minute launch window: “My role is to bridge the gap between high-level vision and operational reality by building infrastructure that allows a merchant to identify their top 1% of customers and launch a global advocacy program in under 15 minutes.”
What distinguishes this from how most adtech companies deploy generative AI is the direction of the logic. Rather than producing synthetic creative faster and cheaper, the system identifies and amplifies real human content that already converts – the AI handles production polish, attribution, and rewards, while the advocate’s voice stays intact.
On the Evolution of the Transaction
While much of the current AI conversation centers on the creative front end, Atanasov is looking at the protocol level. He sees the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) as the silent engine that will eventually move us past the traditional “Add to Cart” era.
“The industry has spent decades perfecting the visual journey, but the real breakthrough is in the ‘handshake’ – how a brand and a buyer actually connect,” he explains. “UCP allows an AI agent to handle the logistics of a purchase instantly. It turns a moment of discovery into a finished transaction without the typical friction of the web.”
For AdScout, this is the foundation of a much larger roadmap. “We are engineering the orchestration layer for the next economic reality. Solving the “Trust Tax” through authentic advocacy is just the initial proof of concept”
On what good AI product thinking looks like
Asked to define genuinely good AI product thinking, Atanasov offers a framework built on erasure rather than addition.
“It marks a decisive shift from ‘Prompting’ (which forces the user to do the work) to Predictive Intent, where the AI identifies high-value opportunities, like isolating a brand’s top 50 advocates, and presents a finished result for permission rather than requiring manual instructions,” he says.
The measure of success, in his view, is invisible infrastructure: “Success is measured by the transition to Sovereign Infrastructure – creating an autopilot that automates the micro-tasks of production, attribution, and rewards so that the human user can exit the operational cockpit and focus entirely on high-level strategy and growth.”
On European regulation as a product advantage
Few questions divide the AI product community more sharply than how to read the EU’s regulatory environment. Atanasov’s answer is unambiguous.
“I land firmly on the side of regulation acting as a high-performance forcing function that produces more durable, enterprise-ready products,” he says. “While technologists often frame rules like the EU AI Act or GDPR as friction, they are actually blueprints for solving the Trust Tax – the inherent skepticism consumers feel toward black-box algorithms.”
He draws a direct line between regulatory compliance and product defensibility: “I’d rather build technology that survives a rigorous audit than one that builds up ‘ethical debt,’ because in the AI era, a product’s most defensible moat is the integrity of its relationship with the user.“
On CEE’s place in the global AI landscape
Atanasov graduated from the American University in Bulgaria in 2010 and built his career in Silicon Valley. His read on the relationship between the two ecosystems has sharpened with distance.
“I see the relationship between the US and Central and Eastern Europe as a partnership of complementary strengths rather than a race to catch up,” he says. “While the US leads in capital and foundational model scaling, CEE has matured into a powerhouse of applied engineering, excelling at building durable, capital-efficient products.”
He is direct about what he considers a personal responsibility: “From my vantage point in the States, I’ve taken it on as a personal challenge to help shift the global perception of the region, demonstrating that it has become a product-sovereign ecosystem.”
That argument gains credibility from the choice itself. A twelve-year Google veteran selecting a Sofia-founded startup as the context for his next chapter is, in its own way, a proof of concept.
AdScout is currently expanding into Western Europe, the Dubai agency ecosystem, and early markets across Europe and Taiwan. Atanasov’s bet is that the advertising industry’s trust deficit is an engineering problem, and that his infrastructure is the solution.
