Two years into the period when “we used AI” became the most common claim in a marketing or operations submission, the question narrowed to one thing. Can the entrant show numbers measured before the model ran and tracked after it ran, on a system someone outside the entrant’s office can, in principle, pull on? The Best in Business Awards 2025 cycle produced a handful of files that cleared that bar in categories with little in common: cross-border legal recovery, business-to-business search, and e-commerce media buying.
Abilda Zhunis received the 2025 recognition for AI integration in logistics and supply chain operations. She is an international lawyer with 15 years of experience in cross-border compliance and recovery, Head of Legal at Aurum International, a member of the International Bar Association and the Association of Business Process Management Professionals, and the author of a monograph on international recovery under sanctions conditions, drawn from that practice. The award was for a platform she architected herself, Compliance & Recovery Hub.
A cross-border recovery file is slow for a specific reason. The same regulatory term carries one meaning in a statute and another in how a given court enforces it, and a recovery case accumulates correspondence in several languages before it resolves. The platform adds a natural-language layer to regulatory and legal text, scores obligations and recovery cases for risk, drafts multilingual correspondence, and connects via an API to the ERP and logistics systems where the obligations actually reside. The risk scoring decides which of a few hundred open obligations a team looks at first, a triage that used to run on a senior lawyer’s memory. The arguable parts of that design Abilda Zhunis argued in print, in Business Law International and in the Journal of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Law.
“The Compliance & Recovery Hub was built because cross-border recovery work does not fit inside any single jurisdiction’s ruleset, and the monograph on anti-sanctions recovery I published for that reason was itself too slow a tool for live casework. The AI layer is doing the interpretive work a lawyer used to do by hand across jurisdictions; without that, the publications in Business Law International and the Journal of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Law are describing a problem no one has solved in practice,” Abilda Zhunis said.
Mila Tkachuk, a Los Angeles digital-marketing manager and the author of scholarly articles in the field, won the performance-marketing category on a single business-to-business case. For an outsourced live-chat support service she reports, within six months, organic traffic up between 120 and 180 percent, top-ten Google positions on high-intent commercial terms, conversion up 25 to 40 percent, lead generation up 60 to 90 percent, and a falling cost of customer acquisition through the same window, against year-on-year growth of about 150 percent. The case was built and measured as one piece of work, with on-page search architecture, commercial-intent content, authority-building and the marketing-technology layer treated as a single system.
The easy mistake in business-to-business services is traffic that converts on nothing. What makes the Mila Tkachuk file legible is that conversion and acquisition cost moved with the traffic in the same window, because the keyword set was chosen for commercial intent and the pages were built to close on it. A traffic chart on its own is the part of the story a client should trust least, and the file does not lean on it.
“Top-ten rankings for high-intent commercial terms in B2B services are not a vanity metric. They are the compounding mechanism that lets conversion rate and lead generation move together rather than trade off, and they only appear when the on-page structure has been built to support them. An AI submission describing a conversion lift without that structure underneath it is describing a month; the submissions worth scoring were describing a six-month compounding,” Mila Tkachuk said.
Kateryna Roh came up through programmatic ad-tech, at Cadent (formerly AdTheorent), and through agency and e-commerce roles at Cuneo, Turboweb, and 1818shop. She has directly supervised more than $ 500,000 in media budgets across a portfolio of over 400 e-commerce clients, holds a 66 percent average portfolio margin, with individual accounts reaching the high nineties, and holds a Ukrainian Business Award from 2023 and a 2025 ECDMA Gold. A margin figure on its own tells a reader nothing until it is broken into the channel mix underneath it, and running media for that many e-commerce accounts builds that reflex.
“Sixty-six percent average portfolio margin is a number that only means something once it is broken into the cross-channel attribution underneath it. The $500K-plus in media budgets I have directly supervised across 400+ e-commerce clients taught me that an AI claim has to be read against what the platform was going to produce anyway. The submissions that scored were the ones where the integration was the thing the platform could not have done on its own,” Kateryna Roh said.
Alisa Aidarova builds AI marketing systems and is the author of AI-MOS Copilot, built after marketing roles at Blank8 from 2020 to 2024. Her Joies campaign returned a 320 percent ROI, and her case record spans a jewelry-brand launch in a crowded niche (Gib Jewels), a repositioning (Loro Oro), and a 2025 Chicago market launch (Sergey Helping Hand), with the methodology now being written up for academic publication. AI-MOS Copilot broadens the number of campaign decisions tested in a cycle; the judgment on each one still belongs to the marketer.
“On Joies we took ROI up 320 percent, and the question I always get is which part was the AI. The honest answer is that AI-MOS Copilot does not replace the campaign decision — it makes it possible to test more decisions than a human could schedule. That is the integration the serious submissions describe; the rest is branding,” Alisa Aidarova said.
Aidarova had also sat on the previous cycle’s panel, which gave her a point of comparison that most evaluators do not have. “Two years ago the AI submissions were describing what had been built. This cycle they were describing what changed in the numbers after deployment — which is the only evidence that distinguishes an AI integration from an AI announcement,” Alisa Aidarova said.
Kirill Timofeev judges from the acquisition side. He runs Mad Lead Printer out of Belgrade and is a managing partner and fractional marketing chief at GFS Group Tradelines, a Los Angeles credit marketplace he has worked since 2019, where revenue grew roughly elevenfold while the cost of acquiring a customer fell from about 1,700 dollars to about 850. His agency portfolios are run to the same kind of figure: around a fifth of client revenue driven by email lifecycle work. Eleven times revenue means one thing if the cost of a customer held and a very different thing if it doubled to get there, and the files that hold up put both numbers on the same line.
“A forty-five percent unique-open rate on B2B lifecycle is not a copywriting outcome. It is a segmentation outcome, and segmentation at that level only exists when the customer record has been tracked continuously from the first touch. The Mad Lead Printer book runs on that discipline — roughly twenty percent email-driven revenue share across portfolios, six percent cold-outreach response — and the AI submissions that survived the BIBA rubric had the same underlying data infrastructure, not a model bolted on over a spreadsheet,” Kirill Timofeev said.
Olena Iashchenko and Yevgeniy Golota also sat on the same 2025 panel.
These files share a property more telling than the size of any single result. Each one is fastened to something a third party could, in principle, pull on. Abilda Zhunis’s platform method is documented in journals that anyone can read and disagree with. Mila Tkachuk’s result is a ranked keyword and a tracked conversion line on a named account. Alisa Aidarova’s campaign has a measured before-and-after on the same book of business. None of the systems was opened for inspection of this piece, but the effect of each was recorded somewhere the entrant did not fully control.
The 2025 list in these categories also named Satenik Ghazaryan as one of its winners.
The cases that hold up share a common trait: the measurement existed before the award. Mila Tkachuk’s attribution ran while the campaign ran. Abilda Zhunis’s interpretation layer existed as a defended argument in print before it was a trophy. Kateryna Roh reads margins broken out by channel because that is how she runs her own accounts. Documenting a method precisely enough to publish invites someone to disagree with it. Tracking acquisition cost honestly through a growth campaign means owning the month it moved the wrong way. Breaking a portfolio margin down into its channels exposes which channels lost money. The numbers in these files carry weight because the people behind them keep paying that cost as routine.
