Consip is moving to place artificial intelligence at the centre of Italian public procurement, with the state purchasing body aiming to cut the average time for managing tenders from about seven and a half months to three. The company says the shift will not be limited to speeding up procedures: it is intended to reshape the whole contract lifecycle, from identifying public sector needs to monitoring delivery, and to turn Consip into a national competence centre for AI in public admin...
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The programme is being rolled out under Consip’s 2026-2029 industrial plan and already covers 38 identified use cases. According to the company, the technology will be used to help design tender structures, answer supplier questions, evaluate technical and financial bids and oversee the execution phase, where much of the real value of public spending is decided. In early tests on completed tenders, Consip says AI has been able to compress bid analysis from weeks into minutes without undermining the quality of the assessment.
Chief executive Marco Reggiani has framed the initiative as an investment in both capability and transparency, saying the goal is to bring systematic AI use into the contract process to improve timeliness, quality and openness in public purchasing. Consip stresses that the technology is meant to support, not replace, human judgement, with final decisions remaining with officials and managers.
The expansion comes with a sizeable internal training effort. Consip says all employees will be involved in a programme totalling about 4,000 hours this year, as the company seeks to build new skills across the workforce rather than confining AI to a small technical team. It also plans to develop new roles linked to orchestration, digital procurement and agent management, while preparing a knowledge system designed to catalogue and reuse AI tools.
The company’s scale helps explain why it sees AI as potentially transformative. Over more than 25 years, Consip says it has managed around 10 million contracts, published more than 5,000 tenders and handled over 14,000 bids, alongside 11 million catalogued items and a wide network of public administrations and ordering points. In the first four months of this year alone, it says 80 tender lots worth €9 billion were launched, while intermediated public spending reached €11.2 billion.
Consip also wants the initiative to spread beyond its own operations. Later this year it plans to launch its first framework agreement for AI solutions for public administrations, alongside a master’s programme on public procurement with the Politecnico di Milano. The broader aim is to help standardise how AI is introduced across the public sector, rather than allowing isolated experiments to develop without coordination.
The company says the strategy is designed to raise the share of public spending it intermediates from one-sixth to one-third by 2030. If that target is met, AI would become not just a tool for efficiency inside Consip, but a pillar of a wider attempt to reshape how the Italian state buys goods and services.
Source: Noah Wire Services
