JobRoom Tirol Wins the World Summit Award Austria 2026
Plamen Petrov · CEO, OpenKBS · November 8, 2026
JobRoom Tirol, WSA Austria Winner 2026, Inclusion & Empowerment. Source: WSA Austria, winners 2026
JobRoom Tirol has won the World Summit Awards Austria 2026 in the Inclusion & Empowerment category, one of eight Austrian winners this year. It is now Austria’s nominee for the global World Summit Award, where an international jury judges the national winners from more than 180 countries and only five projects per category receive the global prize. On 4 November the Tiroler Tageszeitung put it on its pages: “AI is to help homeless people find a job: Tyrolean nominated for world award.”
The Tyrolean is Ruska Atanasova, a social worker in Innsbruck with fifteen years in tourism and ten in social work behind her, and no coding background at all. She built jobroom.eu in the evenings, in her free time, as a non-profit volunteer project, in OpenKBS AI Studio.
A website you talk to
JobRoom is for people who have neither a home nor a job and need both at once. In Tyrol many hotels and restaurants offer staff a wage together with a room, so a job can also be the way out of the emergency shelter. The problem is the application: a CV, an email address, a phone, a computer, German. People sleeping rough have few of these.
So JobRoom has no forms. A visitor picks one of 20 languages, listens to the privacy notice read aloud, and agrees or does not. Then they simply talk. The AI asks questions, listens, and answers in their language, out loud. Behind the conversation it:
- searches the job portals for positions that come with accommodation;
- writes a CV in German from what the person said;
- opens a JobRoom mailbox if the person has none;
- sends the application to the employer, but only after the person has confirmed it;
- reads the employer’s reply aloud when it arrives, and helps draft the answer.
Nothing is sent without the person’s say-so. If no application is sent, everything is deleted at the end of the visit. No data is sold and nothing is used for advertising. The notice says all of this in plain words before the conversation starts.
“I wanted the first step towards a new beginning to be as easy as possible.”
— Ruska Atanasova
How the story started
Ruska read about Diagnoza Bulgaria, the public platform Martin Atanasov built on OpenKBS to make the reported spending of 180 Bulgarian hospitals comparable. She wrote to us with an idea of her own. We agreed on the approach in a few calls, and then she built it herself.
Under the hood JobRoom is a real-time voice model talking to a visitor while every action runs as a tool on the server: job search, CV, mailbox, application, replies. Over the months the project went through more than 400 deployed versions as the voice flow was rebuilt, measured and tightened, until a full visit, from the first word to a sent application, worked in one conversation. Ruska tested every version with the people it is meant for.
What comes next
The international WSA jury reviews the national winners in the autumn; the global awards are presented in 2027. The pilot starts in January 2027 at a facility for homeless people in Innsbruck, to see how JobRoom works in real conditions and whether it helps people into work and an independent life.
After Diagnoza Bulgaria, and alongside the public vote for Bulgaria’s Enlightener of the Year 2026, this is the third project built on OpenKBS by someone who is not a developer to earn national recognition in a year. We see it as the best proof of what we believe: the people who understand a problem best can build the solution themselves.
“For us this is one of the most meaningful ways AI can change people’s lives.”
— Plamen Petrov, OpenKBS
Well done, Ruska. Fingers crossed for the international jury.
The first screen of jobroom.eu: 20 languages, the privacy notice read aloud, and the WSA Austria Winner 2026 badge.