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Good practice Imported

CLARA — Portugal's AIMA Tries AI to Clear a 400,000-Email Backlog Handled by Six Staff

Portugal · Lisbon · See the Portugal profile · See the Lisbon profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 99% 13/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Facing a mailbox of about 400,000 emails handled by only six staff, Portugal's migration agency AIMA is deploying CLARA, an AI system to auto-classify, deduplicate and draft responses to correspondence - recognised with a 2026 digital-transformation award while still in testing.

~400,000 emails
AIMA email backlog (2026)
6 staff
Staff handling the email backlog (2026)
~900,000 cases
AIMA total pending case backlog (broader agency figure) (2024)

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
AIMA - Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo
Period
2025-2026 (pilot/implementation)
Region (NUTS)
PT17
Keywords
migration, asylum, correspondence management, digital government

Context

AIMA, Portugal's migration and asylum agency, has faced a well-documented processing backlog (separately reported at roughly 900,000 pending cases in 2024) and, according to an agency representative, an email inbox of about 400,000 messages handled by only six staff — described by the representative as 'humanly impossible' to keep up with.

Objectives

CLARA ('Classificação Automática de Mensagens da AIMA') is intended to automatically classify incoming correspondence, identify and remove duplicate messages, suggest draft responses, and organise requests within a structured digital platform, reducing manual triage of the agency's email load.

Activities

In February 2026, CLARA won the Association for the Promotion and Development of the Information Society (APDSI)'s 2025 Digital Transformation Award in the 'organisational efficiency' category.

Results

Portuguese press coverage of the award explicitly noted the system was still in testing/implementation and had not yet reached full public operation; no post-deployment figures (emails resolved, response-time reduction) have been published.

Conclusions

CLARA is an early-stage, honestly-labelled pilot: a real, named, government-owned system addressing a documented backlog, but one whose evidence base is currently limited to its stated purpose and an industry award rather than measured operational results.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — No public cost figures disclosed; single-agency pilot tool still in testing — conservative low estimate pending curator review.
Time to results
Short (< 1 year) — Under development/testing through 2025–2026, not yet fully deployed — conservative short-timeline estimate pending curator review.
Staffing & skills
AIMA - Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (6 staff currently handling the email backlog manually)

Conditions for success

  • Structured digital platform for classification, deduplication and draft responses
  • Industry recognition (APDSI 2025 Digital Transformation Award) validating the approach

Common failure modes

  • Still in testing/implementation as of the award coverage, not yet fully operational
  • No post-deployment figures (emails resolved, response-time reduction) published yet

Where it fits

Governance type
national government agency
Scale
single agency pilot

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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