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 Codewell Unlimited and co-financed with roughly 9 million denars (about €150,000) from the Fund for Innovation and Technological Development (FITD).

Two years after launch, ADA went dark: 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 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 (via the World Bank and the national budget), and found that none had been implemented in the public sector, attributing this to the absence of a national AI strategy, legal framework, dedicated budget line, or qualified in-house staff — with North Macedonia ranked 77th in the IMF's AI Readiness Index at the time of the review. ADA is included here as a cautionary case: 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.