In Brescia anti-complaint alert and race time predictions

Digitalisation represents one of the most important innovations introduced by the new Public Contracts Code (Legislative Decree 36/2023) to simplify and speed up tender procedures, increasing transparency and reducing margins of error. In this scenario, a decisive role has been played by the Provinces, which have taken steps to offer municipalities innovative and qualified services. Central Purchasing Centres (CUCs) have proved to be an effective tool, especially for small and medium-sized local authorities, making it possible to concentrate competences, reduce management costs, and guarantee greater professionalism and transparency in procedures.

The numbers speak for themselves: according to Upi data, over 70% of Italian provinces manage a Cuc, providing support to thousands of municipalities. The impact has been significant not only in terms of economies of scale, but also in terms of improving the overall quality of the awarding procedures, enabling many local authorities, among other things, to face complex challenges, such as the implementation of Pnrr projects. One of the most significant experiences is the one of the Province of Brescia, which started a structured experimentation to integrate AI systems in the different phases of the procedure: from the automated analysis of the documentation submitted by the companies to the verification of regulatory compliance, up to the support in the drafting of standardised tender documents. Ai is also used to generate alerts in the event of inconsistencies or litigation risks, enabling officials to intervene promptly.

A further area of testing concerns the prediction of the average times of procedures and the analysis of the needs of municipalities in order to make procurement planning more efficient.

The path has already offered encouraging prospects: reduction of material errors, greater uniformity in the preparation of acts and significant savings in staff time. The Brescian experience is interesting in a context in which recent analyses conducted by Promo Pa Fondazione as part of the Gaips project (Generative Ai for public procurement compliance system) have shown that more than half of those surveyed are now to the use of Ai and ready to use a scalable model in the future - and this will be so - to help, with human control, to overcome some of the main criticalities highlighted by contracting authorities: shortage of staff, difficulties in interpreting regulations, complexity in managing large volumes of data and the need to meet tight deadlines.

On these topics, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Cuc, public and private operators will discuss today, Tuesday 7 October, in Brescia, with speeches by the undersecretary Alessio Butti, the president of Anac, Giuseppe Busia, and the president of Upi, Pasquale Gandolfi.