ADA — North Macedonia's Discontinued Digital Assistant for Investors and Citizens

ADA (ada.gov.mk) was a public-sector digital assistant launched in April 2023 by the Government of the Republic of North Macedonia, together with the Fund for Innovation and Technological Development (FITD), the Technological Industrial Development Zones authority and Invest North Macedonia, and built by the Macedonian firm Kodwell. It answered pre-set and expanding questions about state-aid and investment programmes in Macedonian, Albanian and English.

The tool was intended to handle routine investor and citizen queries that officials estimated would otherwise require six staff working full eight-hour days.

At launch, Vice-Premier Fatmir Bitiçi said ADA served 1,321 citizens in its first 48 hours, at a cost of roughly €150,000. The tool operated for about two years before its maintenance contract lapsed and it went offline around 2025.

Some Macedonian commentators publicly questioned at launch whether ADA reflected genuine AI or a scripted question-and-answer system. No sustained-usage data was ever published beyond the initial 48-hour count.

North Macedonia's State Audit Office reviewed 48 AI-related projects co-financed between 2018 and 2023 (roughly €6.11 million in total spending, about €4.34 million co-financed, largely via FITD and the World Bank) and found that none achieved lasting public-sector implementation — a pattern documented by the European Policy Institute (EPI)-Skopje, and one that ADA's own discontinuation exemplifies.