If you work in public procurement anywhere in the EU, the last 18 months have been a lot. New rules, new formats, new political direction. Let's cut through the noise and talk about what's real.
eForms are here. The transition is messy.
eForms — the EU's standardized format for procurement notices — became mandatory on 25 October 2023, under Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/1780. The SDK is now at version 1.13, with new fields for International Procurement Instrument and energy efficiency data added in late 2024. Over 800,000 notices per year flow through Tenders Electronic Daily (TED).
In practice, the transition has been bumpy. Some member states implemented on time. Others are still working through compatibility issues. Latvia implemented the change — and Estonia rolled out eForms in summer 2024 — but the underlying national systems are still catching up to fully leverage the structured data that eForms enable.
Then there's the Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS), launched on 24 September 2024. It's a federated system connecting TED with national procurement databases, funded by the Digital Europe Programme. The vision: cross-border procurement analytics, real-time market intelligence, automated compliance checks. The reality: it's early days, and most member states are still figuring out data quality.
The real promise of eForms isn't the format itself. It's what you can do with structured, machine-readable procurement data at scale. None of that works well when every country publishes notices differently. eForms fix that. Eventually.
"Made in Europe" is real, and it changes procurement strategy
In March 2026, the European Commission proposed the Industrial Accelerator Act. This one is worth paying attention to.
The Act introduces "European preference" rules for public procurement in strategic sectors. Specific numbers: minimum 20% low-carbon steel content, quotas for EU-origin aluminium (5-25%), and 5% European-origin cement in public works. For clean energy tech — batteries, solar panels, heat pumps, wind turbines — there will be explicit Union-origin requirements in public procurement.
This is a big shift. EU procurement has traditionally been neutral on origin as long as suppliers meet technical requirements and WTO Government Procurement Agreement rules. The IAA introduces a "Made in Europe" layer that procurement teams will need to verify and evaluate.
For suppliers, this means documenting your European production chain becomes part of winning tenders. For procurement teams, it means another dimension of compliance to check in every bid.
Latvia's procurement reform: better late than necessary
Latvia's State Audit Office (Valsts Kontrole) published an audit on 3 December 2024 that called the procurement framework "complicated and inflexible." The numbers backed it up: only 16.5% of IUB users find the regulations understandable. Only 4,321 unique companies won procurement contracts in 2024, out of over 182,000 active businesses. That's 2.4%.
The Cabinet of Ministers approved structural reforms on 26 August 2025, including eliminating national-level thresholds (keeping only EU ones) and reducing exclusion criteria from 12 to 2. The Foreign Investors Council (FICIL) made two public interventions — June and November 2025 — calling for "urgent" reform and flagging favoritism concerns in energy, telecom, and transport sectors.
Our view: simplification alone won't fix the single-bidder problem. The root causes are deeper — small market size, established incumbents, and tender specifications that are sometimes (let's be honest) written with a particular supplier in mind. These are cultural and structural issues that no single legal reform will solve.
What can help is making the evaluation process more transparent and evidence-based. When every finding in a bid evaluation is backed by a specific quote from the documents — when anyone can trace exactly why a decision was made — it becomes much harder to tilt the playing field.
Green procurement is no longer optional
The EU has been pushing Green Public Procurement (GPP) criteria for years, mostly as voluntary guidelines. That's changing.
The Clean Industrial Deal, combined with the Industrial Accelerator Act, is moving toward mandatory environmental criteria in procurement. The EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and the Clean Vehicles Directive already set binding requirements. More sectors will follow.
For procurement teams, this means adding environmental assessment to an already heavy evaluation workload. Technical compliance, financial evaluation, qualification checks — and now sustainability criteria on top.
Estonia is ahead. That's fine, but let's learn from them.
Estonia has been the Baltic poster child for digital government, including procurement. Their strategic procurement action plan (adopted November 2024) sets targets: 2% of procurements by volume and 5% by value should be innovation procurements by 2025. Green procurement targets: 20% by number and 50% by volume by 2035.
Lithuania, meanwhile, launched a completely new procurement system (CVP IS) on 1 December 2024, and mandatory e-invoicing via SABIS kicked in from 1 July 2024. They're also building LitAI, a EUR 130 million AI facility — the only one of its scale in the Baltics.
On a bigger scale, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia jointly submitted a EUR 3 billion Expression of Interest to the European Commission in June 2025 for a Baltic AI Gigafactory. Whether that materializes remains to be seen, but the direction is clear: the Baltics are positioning for AI-driven government services.
The lesson: digital tools only help if procurement teams actually use them differently. Digitizing a slow, paper-heavy process gives you a fast, digital-heavy process. The bottleneck moves, it doesn't disappear.
So what should procurement teams actually do?
Three things, in our view:
First, get ready for eForms data to become useful. Build internal capacity to work with structured procurement data, not just publish notices in the right format.
Second, start thinking about "Made in Europe" verification now. Supply chain documentation, origin certificates, environmental footprint data — these are becoming standard requirements, not nice-to-haves.
Third, prepare for the big one: the European Commission is preparing a full Public Procurement Act — a legislative proposal expected in Q2 2026 that would overhaul all three 2014 procurement directives. The European Parliament passed a resolution in September 2025 with 432 votes calling for radical simplification of the current 476 articles across 907 pages of procurement law.
And finally, look at where AI can take the grunt work off your evaluation teams. Not to replace judgment, but to make sure nothing falls through the cracks when the regulatory burden keeps growing and the team size doesn't. The EU even published Model Contractual Clauses for AI Procurement (MCC-AI) on 5 March 2025 in 24 languages — a sign that Brussels expects AI in procurement to become standard practice. The full AI Act application for high-risk systems hits 2 August 2026.
The regulatory direction is clear: more requirements, more criteria, more transparency. 74% of firms already find procurement procedures too complex. The team sizes and budgets aren't growing proportionally. Something has to bridge that gap.