Case study

How a family-owned Portuguese manufacturer turned AI vendor pressure into a defensible 18-month roadmap

A 100+ year-old family-owned Portuguese industrial manufacturer — around 150 employees, supplier to multiple listed companies, with operations across Iberia — engaged Arqmetrica for a 6-month Fractional Chief AI Officer engagement to bring discipline to vendor evaluation and lift the strategy work to board level.

At a glance

Industry: Industrial manufacturing
Company size: ~150 employees · family-owned · Iberian
Engagement type: Fractional CAIO — 2-4 days/month, 6 months
Headline outcome: €120k recovered from misaligned pilots, one high-ROI use case shipped, capability now sustained internally

By the numbers

What the engagement produced

2: misaligned vendor pilots terminated
1: high-ROI use case shipped to production
€340k: annualised value of the shipped use case
6 mo: engagement length; capability now internal

The challenge

The CEO and board had received seven vendor pitches in the previous eighteen months — predictive maintenance, computer vision quality control, customer service automation, ERP integration, document AI. Two pilots had been signed and were burning budget; neither had a clear success criterion. The board was demanding "an AI strategy" but no internal team had the framework or seniority to evaluate vendors, define ROI gates, or push back on weak pilots without losing the relationships behind them. Every meeting was reactive; every decision felt like a guess.

What we built together

Deliverable 1
Embedded board-level AI advisory
Sat in board meetings 2-4 days/month for six months. Translated vendor pitches into ROI-and-risk-scored decisions. Structured the quarterly AI dashboard the board now reviews independently. Pre-board prep, post-board action items, ongoing translation between technical reality and board-level governance.
Deliverable 2
Vendor evaluation framework + active pruning
A structured evaluation grid scoring technical fit, EU AI Act exposure, total cost of ownership, and exit cost. Used it to terminate two in-flight vendor pilots that lacked defensible ROI criteria — recovering €120k of misallocated budget that was redirected to a single high-value use case instead.
Deliverable 3
Internal capability transfer
Promoted one senior IT manager into a part-time "AI ops lead" role. Transferred the framework, the dashboard, and the vendor evaluation cadence so the function continues without us. The graduation point was contractually defined from day 1 — Arqmetrica leaves; the capability stays.

The outcome

The board no longer asks "what's our AI strategy?" because the strategy is now a quarterly artefact they own. The Fractional CAIO engagement ended at the agreed six-month gate; the framework stayed; the capability stayed; the discipline stayed. The next vendor pitch will be evaluated by an internal team using a documented framework, not gut feel and golf-course relationships.

What leadership said

“We didn't need someone selling us AI. We needed someone helping us decide which AI to buy and which to walk away from. That's what we got.”
— CEO

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