The Plan IA360 was made public on 21 September 2026. The milestone design this page describes is, today, an announced criterion for the €600m voucher: there is no call, governing rules or deadline to activate it.
The usual image of a grant is a one-off payment: the funding is awarded and, later, the money lands in the account. The IA360 business voucher (bono empresarial de IA360) is set up differently: flagship project 11 itself describes it with milestone payments: in this type of mechanism, common in public innovation programmes, the money is released in instalments as each specific stage is shown to have been met. The plan doesn't detail how many instalments the voucher will have or how often they would be reviewed, because there are no governing rules. What you can do now is learn to break a real project into stages of this kind, with the evidence that would prove each one, and to calculate with your own figures when it would start to pay off. That's what the automation ROI calculator is for: with your own numbers it gives you a break-even point, an estimated annual saving and a comparison between a pessimistic, a base and an optimistic scenario, before there is any call to subsidise anything.
An automation project broken into four stages
Take a common case: a business wants a system to automatically classify the supplier invoices a person currently checks by hand. The process behind our process automation service has four stages, and each one lends itself naturally to becoming a verifiable milestone:
Milestone 1 — Mapping signed off. The candidate process is documented: monthly invoice volume, formats that arrive, current classification rules. Evidence: the signed mapping document, with the starting figures — the baseline everything that comes after will be compared against.
Milestone 2 — Workflow built and tested. The flow, built on connectors with the language model at a validation node, runs in a test environment on a real batch of invoices whose correct classification is already known. Evidence: the accuracy rate on that test batch.
Milestone 3 — Production deployment. The flow starts working on real invoices, hosted on the business's own infrastructure. Evidence: a period of sustained operation, with the invoices the system escalated to human review set against the ones it resolved on its own.
Milestone 4 — Stabilised operation and impact measurement. The time and cost of the process after the change are compared against the baseline from milestone 1. Evidence: that comparison, documented with the same indicators taken at the start.
Four milestones, four different types of evidence. None of them is "we've made good progress": each one is something a third party could verify without having to take anyone's word for it.
What changes for the business's cash flow
There's a consequence that tends to go unnoticed when reading the news about the voucher's €600 million: in a milestone-payment mechanism like the one the plan describes, it is usual for someone to have to put the money up front at each stage, because the payout arrives after the stage is certified, not before. The provider's invoice, the hours of whoever builds the flow, the time the team spends training: none of that spending waits for the corresponding milestone to be certified. That's why, if the voucher ends up working this way, the relevant question isn't just how much the funding covers in total, but for how long the business can sustain the gap between what it pays and what it's paid, stage after stage. The calculator mentioned above helps estimate how many months it would take for a project like this to pay for itself, regardless of whether the voucher ends up arriving on these terms or not.
What changes for the project's design
Designing milestones takes more discipline than having a general idea of "we're going to bring AI into this process". The project needs to be broken into stages that can be objectively demonstrated, with data kept from the start. This connects directly with the prioritisation phase of our strategic AI consultancy, where every pilot on the roadmap comes with explicit metrics from day one, not at the end of the project: without that discipline, the last milestone — impact measurement — is the one most easily lost, because nobody documented how things stood before anything changed.
What a business can prepare while there's no call
No date on the official calendar affects two specific tasks: calculating what cash-flow gap each stage of the project would generate before its payment arrives, and breaking the work into phases with an objective result at the end of each one, instead of treating it as a single block. Neither of these is exclusive to this voucher: it's how any project of a certain size is best run, with or without public support behind it.
Frequently asked questions
How many milestones are reasonable for a medium-sized automation project?
The plan doesn't set a number. In practice, between three and five stages are usually enough to separate mapping, building, deployment and measurement without over-fragmenting the project.
What counts as evidence that a milestone has been met, for whoever is funding the project?
Data, not descriptions. An accuracy rate on a test batch, a period of sustained operation, or a before-and-after comparison of indicators are verifiable evidence; "it's almost ready" is not.
Does the ROI calculator replace designing the milestones?
No. The calculator estimates when the investment is recovered using your process's data; designing milestones defines what stages the project is divided into and what evidence proves each one. They're two complementary exercises.
Can a milestone be reworked halfway through a project?
The plan doesn't detail the consequences of a partial shortfall in the case of the voucher. As general management practice, it is worth reviewing a milestone if the real work differs from what was planned, as long as the change is documented with the same evidence as the rest.
Flagship project 11, Diffusion area, Plan IA360, La Moncloa, 21 September 2026. For the rest of the voucher's design, the €600m voucher; for the whole plan, the guide to the Plan IA360.
Content last verified: 22 September 2026.