Georgia’s national high-school AI team returned from Romania this week with a medal in every event it entered. All four students representing the country at the inaugural Central European Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (CEOAI) won medals, according to Georgia Today, as the national team placed fourth overall among the more than 20 European countries that sent roughly 90 competitors.

Giorgi Maisuradze took gold, Mate Rekhviashvili and Nika Kipshidze won silver, and Anton Ingorokva earned bronze. Maisuradze, Rekhviashvili and Ingorokva study at Tbilisi’s Komarov School; Kipshidze attends Public School No. 136.

A new regional olympiad

The competition ran July 14–19 at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, organized with Romania’s Nitro Association and Genesis College. Modeled on the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence, contestants spent two days building and training their own models from scratch on unfamiliar datasets, tackling tasks such as model interpretability, optical character recognition, computer vision and machine-learning security. Interest ran well beyond the original “Central European” footprint, and organizers renamed the event the European Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (EUROAI) mid-competition.

How the team got there

Georgia’s squad came up through the Georgian Artificial Intelligence Association’s (GAIA) National AI Olympiad and AI League, an annual selection pipeline for students in grades 8–12 that feeds into TBC Bank’s Tech Olympiads Hub, run jointly with Business and Technology University. The program is led by Shota Elkanishvili and Nika Mikaberidze.

It’s the same pipeline preparing two national teams — eight students in total — for the IOAI 2026 finals in Astana, Kazakhstan this August — Georgia’s second consecutive world-championship appearance after a bronze-medal debut in Beijing.

For a country still building out its AI education infrastructure, the clean sweep is an early sign the talent pipeline is producing results faster than expected: a program only in its second year has already sent four regional medalists toward a global final.