Lisbon, July 2, 2026 (Lusa) - The CEO of the Centre for Responsible AI emphasised in an interview with Lusa that most public-sector calls for proposals, particularly in the health sector, are currently tailored primarily for established organisations.
“It’s a curse that haunts us,” says Paulo Dimas, lamenting that “most of the calls for proposals issued by the public sector, particularly in the health sector, are not designed for startups”.
In other words, “they are essentially designed for large consultancy firms and, therefore, in practice, are not designed to foster product innovation in Portugal, which is the only way for us to compete globally” with Portuguese products, he said.
The CEO of the non-profit association, who is also the spokesperson for the AI consortium of the same name, further highlights that their mission is to overcome the difficulties “inherent in the adoption of products developed by start-ups” within the Portuguese public sector.
“We are wrapping up this first cycle of developing responsible artificial intelligence products” and this consortium is “absolutely” obsessed with the products because they “endure beyond this timeframe”, “they have to survive the reality of use – either they are used, or they create economic value, or else they die – and that has always been our model of innovation”, he emphasises.
In partnership with industry leaders, “we have worked across three sectors”, the most critical being healthcare, retail and tourism.
“At the end of these three and a half years, we can say that we began with a pilot led by Sword Health at São João Hospital, where around 200 patients had access to telerehabilitation for the first time in Portugal,” he explained.
Consequently, “people who had undergone surgery or suffered a stroke were able, for the first time, to recover from these incidents at home and, as a result, access physiotherapy with a waiting time 97% shorter than before”, he continues.
The team expanded this pilot scheme to the Cova da Beira Local Health Unit, “where there were cases of patients or National Health Service [SNS] users who had to wait two years for physiotherapy and were then able to access it within 10 days”.
This “is what we call transforming the Health Service using artificial intelligence”, Paulo Dimas stressed.
A second product, out of a total of 18, is the one developed by Priberam, “which is already having an impact at the São João Local Health Unit too, hence the importance of maintaining this very close link; so, at the Centre for Responsible AI, what we are essentially creating are relationships of trust between these partners”.
In the case of Priberam, “we’re talking about a product that reduces doctors’ administrative workload, increasing their productivity by 100% in a specific type of task, which involves the coding of clinical records”, he explains.
Paulo Dimas also pointed to another concrete example, that of NeuralShift, which “basically started at the Centre for Responsible AI, found its market and is now on a growth trajectory of tenfold per year, on its way to €1 million in annual turnover”.
This is an example of a product that “has benefited from this entire ecosystem”; in this case, “thanks to the involvement” of the law firm Vieira da Almeida, “trust in this technology was established”, which enabled the company to “expand across the country and also to form a partnership with the research centre, in this case INESC-ID”.
The CEO highlights the role of research centres, which have operated in two ways: “on the one hand, the research they have carried out in cutting-edge areas of artificial intelligence, but also significantly in terms of talent”.
“We’re talking about 94 master’s students and 45 PhD students who completed their doctorates through the centre”.
“These students, with these opportunities to work on products at these start-ups, stay in Portugal, and that is exactly what we want, because they are our future generation,” he concluded ALU/ADB // ADB.
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