General Secretariat reissues AI tender worth over €1.6 million after technical error

The General Secretariat of the Government has reissued a public procurement tender for information technology equipment and software licences related to artificial intelligence, this time after two earlier attempts failed. The renewed procedure, announced on October 1, covers more than €1.6 million and aims to provide hardware and licences to support AI systems across the administration.

The original tender was annulled on September 9 after an operator submitted a question that, due to a technical problem, received an answer intended for a different procurement procedure. The reissued call specifies that purchased systems should enable deployment and use of various AI models for document processing, searching institutional information sources and improving administrative efficiency.

Government response and data localisation

In response to queries, the government emphasised that the procurement is not intended as a single centralised AI solution for all institutions. The announcement clarifies that local infrastructure is needed because of the nature of the information processed, and the technical specification allows the platform to operate on-premise so that data remain in a controlled environment and do not need to be exposed to public or external AI models.

Minister for Information Society Stefan Andonovski told a television programme last week that he first learned about the tender from questions raised on the show. The General Secretariat, in its reply to journalists, confirmed the purchase is intended for systems used by the Secretariat itself.

Only twenty days before the September annulment, in August the Secretariat cancelled another AI procurement aimed at the Public Procurement and Human Resources sectors. That procedure was struck down after the tender-opening commission found that the documentation did not define the criterion for selecting the most favourable offer, a necessary element for proper evaluation and ranking of bids.

The government also noted that the earlier August tender would have included several items, among them visual recognition of employees via government cameras. That particular tender has not been reissued.

Photo: press material from the event