Artificial intelligence can no longer be treated as a strictly technical topic reserved for specialists. During the ARIR monthly members’ meeting held on May 7, 2026, Alin Popescu, founder of Avocatnet.ro and the technology education platform Club-101.ro, member of the European Data Protection Board expert group and author of the first Romanian guide to the AI Act, presented a historical and strategic perspective on the transformations brought by artificial intelligence, with direct implications for investor relations professionals.
The presentation started from an essential premise: the current global AI race did not emerge from scientific curiosity, but from a fear of concentration of power. The turning point was Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014, which triggered a chain of reactions: from the establishment of OpenAI (2015) and Anthropic (2021), to the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and, subsequently, the Stargate project, with commitments of USD 500 billion in AI infrastructure.
With the launch of ChatGPT — the fastest-adopted digital product in history, reaching 100 million users in two months — artificial intelligence entered everyone’s lives. From that moment onward, any company became implicitly required to have a position on this topic. Institutional investors have already started including AI-related questions in their analysis processes, and this trend is expected to accelerate.
At global level, Alin Popescu identified four major power blocs: the United States, China, Europe, and hardware suppliers, particularly TSMC in Taiwan, which controls approximately 90% of the global advanced chip market.
Europe has chosen the path of regulation through the AI Act, with implementation phases in 2025 and August 2026, while the United States and China are investing massively in infrastructure and computing capacity. This asymmetry in approach creates both compliance costs for European companies and opportunities for those preparing in advance.
The presentation concluded with a series of questions that Alin considers particularly relevant for investor dialogue today:
• what proportion of the company’s revenues depends on AI-automatable workflows,
• what exposure exists to semiconductor supply chains,
• how the regulatory risk imposed by the AI Act is being managed, and, last but not least,
• whether the company is an AI producer or an AI consumer — a distinction that fundamentally changes the balance of power in relation to technology platforms and the impact on long-term margins.