INCENTEA: The tech “dinosaur” from Leiria that reinvented itself with AI to double in size

INCENTEA, a company headquartered in Leiria, battered by the storms, but whose decentralized model proved resilient.

Carlos Vaz explains how the multinational born in the center of the country intends to reach 50 million euros in turnover by tackling organizational “chaos”: “Poorly defined processes only speed up chaos”.

INCENTEA closed 2025 with consolidated revenue of 24 million euros and growth of 5.4%. For Carlos Vaz, Marketing Director and AI specialist at the digital consulting company headquartered in Leiria, this result is the fruit of a clear strategic decision: “We concentrated on what is our core, we divested companies that were not our core, and that allowed us to be more focused.”

This focus is the fuel for the stated goal of doubling the business by 2027, turning this tech “dinosaur”, as the director himself calls it since it is approaching 40 years of existence, into a leader in Artificial Intelligence applied to management. This growth ambition is underpinned by a step change in the organization itself. Carlos Vaz points out that the group no longer plays in the league of small companies, having gained a robustness that allows it to face larger-scale challenges. “INCENTEA has gone from an SME to a small mid-cap,” says the executive, stressing that this leap in size is essential to keep up with the technological acceleration imposed by the cloud and by Artificial Intelligence, the new tools of the company that helps other organizations adapt to the challenge of digital transformation. Present in Portugal and Spain, but also in France, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde, INCENTEA is today a true multinational.

It achieved this through a well-planned M&A (mergers and acquisitions) strategy that also served to “incorporate the knowledge” of decades and then “develop the tools adapted to new needs,” says Carlos Vaz. Iberian expansion is another key piece of the puzzle. With the integration of Dragomar, INCENTEA stepped on the accelerator in the Spanish market, focusing on niches such as the maritime industry. “With Spain and Portugal being countries with an immense coastline… there is a strong commitment to the maritime industry,” explains Vaz.

From the oil of the Future to intelligent agents

INCENTEA is currently developing customized AI agents for each customer that act on what Carlos Vaz calls the “oil of the future” – data. But he leaves a warning for organizations: “companies have to see, first of all, whether they have properly cataloged information. And that is groundwork.” After all, he reminds us, technology is not a magic wand that solves structural management problems. Poorly defined processes only speed up chaos. In the companies where INCENTEA provides consulting, the strategy is to ensure that companies gain maturity in the proper application of algorithms, so that in the end the real impact of Artificial Intelligence is on decision-making. One of the success stories he tells involves automating a thousand emails a day at a certification company, something that until then was done by one person. An agent we created automatically detects the intent in the email… identifies it and delivers the request to the CRM for the person responsible. Vaz highlights that this democratization of technology means SMEs now have access to tools that were exclusive to large companies. The specialist notes that when human decision-making is augmented by technology, its quality increases by at least 12%. And, for companies, the competitive advantage lies in speed: it allows better decisions to be made, because they are based on context, with more information

Funding and the fear of selling

When it comes to funding this technological revolution, INCENTEA is present in the PRR mobilizing agendas, working in clusters. But Vaz offers constructive criticism of the national innovation ecosystem: we have to lose the fear of using the word ‘sell’. We have to sell what we create… we have to create impact in the solutions we create to get a return on the investment. At INCENTEA itself, the goal is for two-thirds of the value needed to reach 50 million euros to rest on these intelligence services. But although AI makes it possible to recover up to 90 days a year in financial and management tasks, Carlos Vaz assures us that the human factor remains untouchable. The final click is human, he concludes, reinforcing that his company’s mission remains to use technology to free people for higher-value-added areas. honoring the motto Technology for People.

Trial by fire in Leiria: when the cloud beats the storm

The way INCENTEA dealt with the “train of storms” that battered the Leiria region is, for Carlos Vaz, an example of resilience. “We were in the eye of the hurricane,” he recalls, describing serious physical damage and weeks without stable communications. But the bet on decentralization and the cloud proved its worth. The company had opened new premises only four months before the storm hit the city: “the space was rendered unusable,” due to serious physical damage, notably widespread broken glass and structural failures, forcing the team into a return to the offices full of constraints that persist to this day. “A month and a week later we still had no communications,” reveals Carlos Vaz, stressing that the operation also faced successive days of energy instability. Faced with this scenario of physical destruction, the solution came from the business model: the bet on a decentralized infrastructure. “This allowed the operation to continue.”

The systems remained intact, in the cloud, so consultants were able to continue supporting companies in every country and region where the group operates. “Our people were extraordinary,” praises Carlos Vaz.

For INCENTEA, this episode was also a demonstration of how business continuity is, today, also a matter of technology strategy and not just of physical infrastructure.

Article by Ricardo Simões Ferreira in Jornal Dinheiro Vivo
Published on April 30, 2026, the online article is available here.