NAIS and Beyond: Grading the Czech Government's AI Strategy Against Its CZK 19bn Price Tag

The updated National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2030 (NAIS) was approved by government resolution in July 2024, prepared by the Ministry of Industry and Trade in cooperation with the public and private sectors. It sets priorities across seven interconnected domains — research and innovation, education, the labour market, legal and ethical aspects, security, industry, and public administration — and is implemented through an annually updated Action Plan designed to respond flexibly to technological developments. The 2025 Action Plan, approved by government on 2 April 2025, allocates approximately CZK 19bn to project-level initiatives across those seven areas, alongside a separately estimated annual NAIS operating budget of roughly €125m and a proposed CZK 232m specifically for EU AI Act implementation between 2026 and 2028, covering enforcement roles, oversight functions and a new AI Competence Centre for e-government.

Where the money is landing

Concrete pilot results are beginning to surface, particularly in public-sector and state-owned-enterprise deployments. Prague's public transport operators have reportedly deployed AI-driven monitoring across 21 escalators and 189 sensors as part of predictive-maintenance pilots. Arriva, the transport operator, has reported a 13.5 per cent improvement in mean time between failures and a 66 per cent reduction in vehicle tows following AI-assisted maintenance deployment. Hyundai's Czech manufacturing operation has reported CZK 13m in annual savings from AI-driven process improvements, with a payback period of three to four months — the kind of concrete, near-term ROI case that NAIS architects have pointed to as evidence the strategy is working as intended.

The TWIST programme, which the Ministry of Industry and Trade has flagged as a key funding vehicle within NAIS, offers grants of up to CZK 30m to support AI development projects — sitting alongside the broader Action Plan's mix of subsidy programmes, business-facing guidance manuals, and retraining courses.

The adoption gap the strategy hasn't closed

Despite the funding and pilot activity, national adoption figures tell a more sobering story: 41 per cent of large Czech firms report using AI, but that falls to roughly 11 per cent when measured across companies of all sizes — a gap NAIS's public messaging has been slower to address directly than its pilot showcases. A 15-week upskilling programme aimed at public-sector and municipal employees has been positioned as a partial answer, built around practical, prompt-writing-level AI literacy rather than deep technical retraining — a pragmatic scope given the scale of the workforce involved, but one that leaves the more structural skills gap — AI auditors, compliance-literate architects, ML engineers — largely unaddressed by this particular programme.

Regulatory alignment as strategy, not afterthought

NAIS's framers have been explicit that regulatory alignment with the EU AI Act is not incidental to the strategy but central to it. The Act's phased entry into force — general provisions from August 2024, governance obligations from August 2025, and high-risk system requirements from August 2026 — has been used by NAIS's architects as a forcing function to build institutional AI-governance capacity ahead of the compliance deadlines, rather than scrambling to build it afterward. The CEE AI Index 2026 assessment credits this approach: it names Czechia, alongside Poland and Estonia, as one of the region's "shapers" — countries structurally positioned to convert AI Act compliance into a competitive advantage for attracting risk-averse institutional capital, in contrast to countries still building foundational governance infrastructure from scratch as the deadlines arrive. Update, August 2026: those deadlines have since moved — the EU's Digital Omnibus on AI, in force from 27 July 2026, pushed high-risk compliance dates back to December 2027 and August 2028, which we cover in full in our report on why Brussels loosened the AI Act.

The verdict, provisionally

Judged against its own stated goals, NAIS earns a mixed but not unfavourable mid-term grade. The strategy has produced real, measurable pilot outcomes in public transport and manufacturing, built regulatory infrastructure ahead of EU deadlines that peer countries are still scrambling to construct, and established funding mechanisms — TWIST among them — that are demonstrably moving money into AI projects rather than remaining purely aspirational. What it has not yet done is meaningfully close the adoption gap between the country's largest firms and the small and mid-sized companies that make up the bulk of the Czech economy — a gap that matters more for the country's long-run competitiveness than any individual escalator-monitoring pilot, however successful.