Portugal wants to teach AI to 100,000 SME workers. It starts in October, at a mould factory in Marinha Grande
The first pilot launches in October in the Leiria region, with around 100 workers, while a second tests AI inside five or six mould-making factories in Marinha Grande. The national target is 100,000 SME workers, backed by over €400 million already paid out through IFIC and another €800 million reprogrammed from the PRR recovery fund.
Portugal already had a €400 million plan for artificial intelligence, announced back in June. What it lacked was a date and an address. Now it has both.
The Minister of Economy and Territorial Cohesion, Manuel Castro Almeida, told Parliament the goal is to train 100,000 workers at small and medium-sized businesses in artificial intelligence — and that the first pilot launches as soon as October, in the Leiria region, with around 100 workers from various companies. A second, narrower pilot tests the technology inside five or six mould-making factories in Marinha Grande, one of the country’s oldest industrial clusters.
The choice is not accidental. As the minister himself admitted, Portugal’s business fabric is made up mostly of very small companies — three employees on average — with no in-house IT teams and no budget to hire AI consultants. A large company trains its own staff; a six-person mould workshop does not have that option, unless someone brings the training to it.
That is where the money comes in. Over €400 million has already been paid out through the Financial Instrument for Innovation and Competitiveness (IFIC), run by Banco Português de Fomento under the PRR recovery plan, and the government has reprogrammed a further €800 million from the PRR specifically for AI adoption in companies. Seen together, the figures confirm that June’s plan — built around AI “gigafactories” and supercomputing — always had a training component too, just without a date attached.
If the Leiria pilot runs as planned, the intention is to roll it out “from Minho to the Algarve” after an initial evaluation, with no fixed end date for the national expansion. For an economy built on micro and small businesses, the real test will not be the speech in Parliament — it will be whether a mould factory in Marinha Grande, within a few weeks, can actually get artificial intelligence doing something worth the time of the people who work there. That will only be confirmed four to six months later, once the first group of SMEs finishes the pilot and someone counts how many still use what they were taught.
Worth noting: Marinha Grande now has two national programmes waiting on real-world results — the productive-innovation funding round that was already running this year, and now this AI pilot. Neither yet has a public count of how many mould-making firms it has actually supported.
By Oliver Grant
Illustrative image · Photo: ThisIsEngineering / Pexels
