A Conversation With Olga Ukrainskaya, Technical Marketing Manager, AI Expert And AI45 2026 Judge

Tell Us About Yourself And Your Experience in the AI Industry

I am Olga Ukrainskaya, and work at a B2B SaaS company as a Technical Marketing Manager, which means I spend my days making AI work inside a corporate environment. My focus is on connecting AI to real business operations: CRM systems, marketing automation, lead qualification, data pipelines. I build workflows that actually run in production, not in demos. I also speak at AI marketing events in the UK and mentor professionals who are building their own AI-driven systems. So I see this space from multiple angles: as a practitioner, as a speaker, and as someone who has helped others get started.

What Interests You Most About AI In 2026?

What interests me most and what is becoming a clear trend is AI being integrated with company software stacks: CRMs, ERPs, intranets, marketing automation platforms, BI tools, HR systems, helpdesk platforms, project management tools, and data warehouses. This takes the capabilities of these platforms far beyond what they were originally built for.

Building apps using Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and others, and connecting stacks via API opens up incredible opportunities, especially now that software development is becoming intent-based and building AI agents is accessible to non-technical users. Data quality matters more than ever: cleaning data, flagging anomalies, making it ready for AI to work with.

The more embedded AI becomes, trust and regulatory questions are impossible to ignore: how do we give AI access to sensitive data and still keep security at a high level? On the content side, AI-generated material is getting easier to spot and people are getting tired of it. Human-created content is becoming more valuable and credible. The LLM market is getting more competitive too, with Claude taking the lead as the most powerful tool available

Do You Have Any Concerns About AI and Businesses Working with AI At the Moment?

Security and shadow AI are probably the biggest ones. People are using personal AI tools with company data outside any governance structure, and most organisations have no visibility into that. Closely linked is the accountability gap: when AI produces wrong output and something goes wrong, it is rarely clear who owns that. Regulatory and compliance requirements around GDPR and industry-specific rules are still catching up with what AI can do, and most businesses are not prepared for that gap.

There is also a real problem with AI not being trained on company-specific data, which means outputs are generic at best and misleading at worst. As AI-generated content scales across every channel, misinformation becomes much easier to produce and much harder to catch. The further we go, the more interesting it gets, but also the more important it becomes to stay in control.

What Do You Hope To See from AI45 Entrants In 2026?

Genuinely creative solutions that solve real problems, not AI for its own sake. The most exciting entries will be ones where AI is doing something that materially improves someone’s life, reduces environmental impact, saves time in a way that matters, or replaces a tedious and error-prone process with something fast and reliable. I am hoping to see breakthrough thinking, not incremental feature additions wrapped in an AI label.

What Advice Would You Give To Companies Entering AI45 This Year?

Position your technology as a digital employee, not a tool. Show how it integrates with existing CRMs, ERPs, and data systems to perform end-to-end tasks like procurement, scheduling, or customer service without human oversight. Demonstrate that it fits into an existing corporate stack via open API or connectors, because nobody is rebuilding their infrastructure for a new product. Come with hard numbers: OpEx reduction, revenue per employee, process efficiency. And take security seriously from day one.

What Can Entrants Do To Stand Out From the Competition?

Identify a specific, overlooked, high-impact problem in a niche field and solve it properly. In an era of AI-generated content, your unique human voice is your competitive advantage. Build strong, consistent branding that showcases your ethos and use storytelling to connect emotionally with your customers. That is what people remember.

What Is Your Number One Piece of Advice To Aspiring Entrepreneurs?

There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. Be persistent, never give up, stay creative, and never stop learning. The people who succeed are not always the most talented or the best funded. They are the ones who kept going when it got hard.