Last Saturday yours truly was interviewed for the BBC Radio 4's Moneybox programme about Capita's civil service pension contract. This is a contract they were awarded for 10 years in late 2025 and has had a rough start. In the interview I talk on how these
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure to visit Bratislava for the first time and attend a conference organised by UVO. On that trip I also took part on a podcast interview for their procurement series where we talked a lot about "buy European" and third
Earlier this month, 17 member States (plus Norway*) led by Austria, France and Germany have put out a call asking the Commission to abandon its plan to propose a Regulation. The Gang of 18 suggests instead to maintain the status quo of using Directive(s) as the legal form for
The Portuguese government laid down in Parliament yesterday a proposal for a new law governing the powers and operation of the Portuguese Audit Court. After weeks of discussion in the media and sniping from both the government and the president of the Audit Court, the proposal is now finally on
The Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) is barely out as a proposal and it is already creating an impact in China. According to the Financial Times, Beijing is threatening retaliation against the EU for the rules included in the IAA. While I find it deliciously ironic the Chinese commerce ministry is
The Portuguese government approved yesterday a new version of the Public Contracts Code, making good in the promise of reviewing it before the upcoming publication of the Public Procurement Act draft by the European Commission. As there is no official text yet ( we have to wait for the Diario da
Google launched last week a new version of its open source - sorry, open weights - Gemma models. So far they seem to work really well for open weights models and a step up from last year's Gemma 3, as per their report card. They also have nice,
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