Ognyan Georgiev

Ognyan Georgiev leads CityLabs Institut, where his work focuses on how cities design and deploy the digital infrastructure, governance models, and civic technology that will carry them through the AI transition. His focus is practical: how city administrations move beyond pilot projects into durable, citizen-facing services, and how second-tier European cities can compete with Western hubs for talent, capital, and attention.

Before CityLabs, Ognyan spent more than nine years as a reporter and editor at Kapital, Bulgaria's leading business and political weekly, where he covered EU funding, public procurement, regional politics, and urban development from the paper's Plovdiv bureau. He remains one of the region's most recognized bylines on cities and regional development.

As a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Ognyan researched urban re-migration and what makes European cities attractive to returning talent. He has since been a Milena Jesenská Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, a Marcin Król Fellow at Visegrad Insight, and a fellow of Das Progressive Zentrum in Berlin and the Robert Bosch Stiftung. His 2026 CEPA study A Tale of Three Cities — a comparative analysis of Plovdiv, Cluj-Napoca and Gdańsk — argues that the winners of Europe's next migration wave will be cities, not countries.

At the Human × AI Conference 2026, Ognyan moderates the panel How Cities Can Emerge as Active Architects of a Human-Centred AI Future, bringing together city officials, founders, and policy leaders to discuss how European cities can shape, rather than simply adopt, the next generation of AI systems.