ADA — North Macedonia's Discontinued AI Digital Assistant for Investment and State-Aid Information

In April 2023, North Macedonia's government launched ADA, described as the first AI-based digital assistant in the public sector in the region, to give companies and citizens round-the-clock information — in Macedonian, Albanian and English — about investment conditions and state-aid programmes. The system was developed by the company Codewell Unlimited and co-financed with roughly 9 million denars (about €150,000) from the Fund for Innovation and Technological Development (FITD).

Two years later, ADA went dark. According to reporting on North Macedonia's AI spending, the assistant became non-functional because the government did not extend its contract with the economic operator that had built and maintained it — a routine procurement lapse rather than a technical failure, but one with no contingency plan behind it.

ADA's fate mirrors a wider pattern documented by North Macedonia's State Audit Office: between 2018 and 2023 the state co-financed 48 artificial-intelligence projects worth over €6.11 million — through the World Bank and the national budget — and found that none of them had been implemented in the public sector. Auditors attributed this to the absence of a national AI strategy, legal framework, dedicated budget line, or qualified in-house staff; North Macedonia ranked 77th in the IMF's AI Readiness Index at the time of the review.

The case is included here as a cautionary one: a real, publicly funded citizen-facing AI assistant that launched with genuine multilingual functionality and a working budget, but folded for lack of a continuity plan — a governance and procurement lesson as relevant as any success story.

Read the full analysis: https://www.visive.ai/news/millions-spent-on-ai-in-north-macedonia-no-functional-projects-yet