Daugavpils’s AI automation agency.

Daugavpils is the second-largest city in Latvia and the industrial, transport and education centre of the Latgale region in the country's south-east, with a population of about 78,126. It is a multicultural, predominantly Russian-speaking city on the Daugava river, near both the Lithuanian border (about 25 km) and the Belarus border (about 33 km). Its economy runs on machinery and metalworking, rail rolling-stock overhaul, high-tech and synthetic-fibre manufacturing, logistics and transit, food processing, and Daugavpils University.

Rail engineering and metalworking are the historical backbone. The Daugavpils Locomotive Repair Plant (DLRR), founded in 1866, is the largest rolling-stock overhaul and modernisation works in the Baltic states, employing more than 600 people and running service subsidiaries in Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Around it sits a dense metalworking cluster: the Ditton Driving Chain Factory, the DAUER metalworks, Ziegler machine works, and SIA Weld, much of it now operating inside the Latgale Special Economic Zone.

The newer story is high-tech export manufacturing. Light Guide Optics International makes silica optical fibre for medical and industrial use and exports over 99.9% of its output, backed by a 33 million euro capacity expansion announced in late 2024. Axon' Cable, a French interconnect manufacturer, runs a Daugavpils plant supplying defence, aeronautics, medical, automotive and satellite-communications markets, with capacity for up to 700 jobs. Nexis Fibers produces industrial polyamide yarn, Latvijas Maiznieks anchors food processing, and Daugavpils University has launched a new electronics degree with these employers. Latgale SEZ officials now describe the area as the optoelectronics centre of Latvia.

For Daugavpils manufacturers and exporters, the work that drains skilled people is rarely on the shop floor: it is the production paperwork, the quality and traceability records, the customs and freight documentation, the supplier coordination across borders, and the multilingual customer and HR queries. Firms here deploying AI for predictive maintenance, document and quality automation, and Latvian, Russian and English customer operations are reclaiming that time, with EU GDPR and DVI discipline built in from day one rather than bolted on later.