Infraestruturas de Portugal’s BIA AI procurement is criticized as overly ambitious and risky. The post highlights security concerns with AI agents and challenges the “open source” requirement, noting most AI models are only open weights, raising legal and technical issues.
After the first entry and yesterday's one on the object of the Infraestruturas de Portugal attempt to procure an AI agent, it is time to look into the contract value and its cost. Those may look as synonyms but are not. The award criteria will be covered in
Yesterday I started this series of blogposts by some procedural aspects of the project. Today, we're moving on to the object of the contract, that is BIA the Artificial Intelligence Bot (or agent). And here things are interesting as well to say the least. BIA is to be
I saw on the cover of a portuguese financial newspaper a couple of weeks ago a piece about Infraestruturas de Portugal (the state-owned infrastructure public company) tendering a €1M contract for an AI tool called BIA - Bot de Inteligencia Artificial (Artificial Intelligence Bot) to be used to assist in
The Commission published last week the draft Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) proposal, after delaying it a couple of times. The draft is complex and puzzling at stages and frankly it lacks internal coherence since it includes four distinct approaches to achieve its stated objectives: speeding up permit-granting procedures for industrial
Every year since 2022 I update my table on the use of different public procurement procedures across the EU, based on data available on TED. Here's the table for procedures initiated up to the end of 2025. Year Open Restricted I Partnership C Dialogue CP + Neg Total 2014
On my post earlier today I mentioned not being able to access the national procurement portal. As it happens, I can if I use a Mac or an iOS device...but not on my linux machines. So, the portal is up and available for most, at least. Portugal publishes a
In the fall of 2025 I got wind that the Portuguese government was going to review the Public Contracts Code in short notice. This revision was described as a thorough affair and not a simple nip and tuck. In a discussion on Linkedin I was assured the draft would be
Work for long enough in a field and you will watch the same debates happen time and time again. This time around it is the idea of local preferences in public procurement. Now, for the particular debate I cannot say having been part of it multiple times, but some of
Iwas challenged by my good friend Marko Turudic on Linkedin to pick one (and only one) article of the public procurement Directive to change in the upcoming revision. I am going to be very obvious on my choice by picking Article 4 - thresholds. It should come to no surprise
I'm making my way through the Commission's recent report on public procurement and one of the things that caught my attention was the discussion on simplification. As the report rightly mentions, simplification was one of the objectives of the 2014 procurement reform. The problem is that
Since I last wrote about this case a couple of weeks ago, some more information has come to light. In a press conference soon after the accident the president of Carris informed that the company had awarded a 5 month contract to its existing contractor and the company uploaded the