Today's post continues to look into the substantive elements of the Infraestruturas de Portugal procurement process for BIA. It will start by discussing open weight models before moving on to OCR (optical character recognition) and RAG (retrieval augmented generation) before concluding with the deployment plans for BIA. It
The EU procurement consultation shows low participation and a divide: public buyers want flexibility, businesses prefer clear rules. Shared trends include less focus on lowest price and competition, but results may be unrepresentative.
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
Procurement Directives Revision
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
funicular Lisbon
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
AI
The Guardian published an article yesterday claiming that Albania created an AI 'minister' that would be responsible for public procurement in the country. The logic behind this idea is to make Albania "a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption" in the words of
funicular Lisbon
Yesterday, the 140 year old Gloria funicular crashed into a building killing at least 16 people and injuring 21 more. The funiculars in Lisbon had operated for almost 1.5 centuries without any loss of life. Questions will be asked about the accident reasons and what was behind it. Finding
in memoriam
I received an email earlier this morning informing me of Chris Bovis passing and I am taking it as an opportunity to reflect on my memories with him. To me he was always generous and gracious and I remain grateful for his help and encouragement over the years. My first
electronic procurement
I have a new paper out on electronic public procurement in the EU, focused on the failures of the current legislative framework with some ideas of what should be done in the upcoming revision of the procurement Directives. Here's the abstract: This paper critiques the EU’s electronic
Danish EU Presidency 2025
The Danish EU Presidency has put out its programme for the upcoming semester when Denmark will hold the presidency of the Council of the European Union. The programme is called "A strong Europe in a changing world" but when it comes down to public procurement we are not
direct cross-border procurement
I have just uploaded to SSRN a new working paper on the failure of the successive rounds of Directives in solving the direct cross-border issue. In short, home bias is as almost as present today as it was in the 1960s. For this one I dabbed a bit outside the
Kolin
The European Commission put out last week a non-paper on the interpretation and application of the Kolin and Qingdao cases for economic operators coming from third countries. This is a fairly cautious document and probably the most the Commission can do at the moment and in this Q&A
public procurement consultation
Earlier this week the Commission put out a summary of the findings on the public procurement consultation for the revision of the procurement Directives. Albert has a great entry on the findings of the consultation but I will be taking a different view on this one. In total the consultation
Portuguese general elections 2025
PAN (Greens/EFA) Of all parties represented in the Portuguese Parliament, PAN is the smallest and the only party with a proper, thoughtful set of proposals for public procurement. For the most part they are detailed and up to the point. It is a shame the other parties have not
Portuguese general elections 2025
Livre (Greens/European Free Alliance) Back in 2024, Livre had one of the most compelling set of policy proposals for public procurement. Thorough and detailed, unlike those from the larger parties. For the upcoming general election, however, Livre has decided not to add any new ideas for public procurement opting