Government Counts on an AI Platform to Cut Planning Waits by 60 to 70 Percent, With Council Pilots Due Before the Year Is Out

The Government wants an artificial intelligence platform called LicencIA to cut the time it takes to get planning and other licences in Portugal by 60 to 70 percent, and says the first pilots with councils will start before the end of the year. Gonçalo Matias, the Ministro Adjunto e da Reforma do Estado (Minister in the Cabinet and for State Reform), set out the target to MPs on Friday 30 October, during the committee hearings on the 2027 State Budget, Lusa reported via Renascença and CNN Portugal.

"Our objective is to reduce licensing times by 60 to 70 percent using artificial intelligence and technology," Matias told the joint session of the budget and the state reform and local government committees. He tied it directly to housing: "All the studies show that one of the causes of the housing crisis was the time licensing takes," he said, and faster licensing is "an important instrument to fight the crisis".

What LicencIA is meant to do

The Government describes LicencIA as a public platform that will bring urban planning, industrial and environmental licensing into one place. On the Government's own portal, a note on a 6 October speech by the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Carlos Abreu Amorim, calls it an integrated, cross-cutting solution for licensing processes, with pilot projects in selected municipalities by the end of 2026.

Matias has given more detail on two earlier occasions:

• At a conference on 16 September, he said it would be "the single point of entry and management" for construction, environmental and industrial licences. He said AI would work mainly on preparing and processing files, while the final decision stays with people, according to ECO.
• In Coimbra on 18 September, he said the pilots would run in a "relatively small number" of municipalities that are already well prepared technologically, Coimbra among them. "We will work with the councils' platforms and, on top, put a layer of artificial intelligence," he said, according to Lusa via As Beiras and the paper's own report.

On Friday, Matias said the approach does not "nibble at" the powers of the câmaras municipais (councils), which remain the bodies that decide on planning applications. "Once it is working, the LicencIA platform will make it possible to license a project with all the licences it needs," he said, according to Jornal Económico, which reported that pilot projects are being launched with councils that have agreed to host them.

Built on the new planning rules

The platform sits on top of the revised Regime Jurídico da Urbanização e Edificação, or RJUE (the legal regime for urbanisation and building), which has applied since 1 October. That reform, Decreto-Lei n.º 108/2026 (Decree-Law 108/2026), lets owners in already-planned areas start work on a filed prior notification, and gives councils 20 days to decide on a building licence before it is tacitly approved, as we reported when it took effect. Matias told MPs the new regime "shortens deadlines enormously, from 200 to 50 days", according to Jornal Económico. In Coimbra in September, he said the RJUE already provides for licensing to be done electronically and to benefit from AI.

LicencIA is also separate from the single code for business licensing that the Government is still drafting.

What has not been published

The Government has not published a list of the councils in the pilot, beyond Coimbra, a launch date, a budget or a technical description of the platform. The 60 to 70 percent figure is a ministerial target: no pilot results have been released to measure it against. We found no page for LicencIA on the Government's portal beyond the 6 October mention.

What it means for residents

For now, nothing changes in how a planning application is made. Anyone extending a house, building a home or changing a building's use still applies through their council under the RJUE, on the council's own platform. If the pilots go ahead as described, residents in the pilot councils would be the first to see AI used to check and route their files. The minister's case is that faster licensing means more homes reaching the market sooner; official data show that only about two in three of the homes licensed over the past seven years have been completed.

At the same hearing, Matias said the year would end with 85 Lojas do Cidadão (Citizen Shops) and 1,200 Espaços do Cidadão (smaller citizen service points), and that in-person service will not be cut as more services move online.