Kaunas’s AI automation agency.

Kaunas is Lithuania's second city and its leading manufacturing, logistics, and engineering centre, with about 304,000 residents in the city, 410,000 in the urban area, and 656,000 across the metropolitan region in 2024. Metro GDP sits near 15.86 billion euros, and Kaunas and Vilnius counties together produce roughly two-thirds of national GDP with about half the population. The city carries one of the largest manufacturing bases in the country, around 3,212 manufacturing companies, close to a fifth of the national total, spanning automotive electronics, medical devices, food, furniture, plastics, and textiles.

The defining asset is the Kaunas Free Economic Zone near the A1 and A6 motorways and Kaunas Airport, which has attracted more than 1.5 billion euros of investment from international manufacturers. Hella, a Forvia automotive-electronics and lighting supplier, builds sensors, actuators, and control modules from its plant by the airport; the former Continental smart factory produced radar sensors and highly-automated-driving platforms; Hollister and Esco Medical Technologies manufacture medical devices; Aconitum makes pharmaceuticals; and FL Technics runs aircraft maintenance. Automotive, electronics, medical technology, and pharmaceuticals make up more than 40% of zone investment, most of it foreign direct investment, and these plants run high-volume operations under IATF 16949, EU MDR, and EU GMP quality regimes.

IT and engineering run alongside the factories. Cognizant operates its Devbridge software-engineering studio in Kaunas, and Teltonika, the Lithuanian IoT manufacturer, runs in-house R&D here and is building a 34 million euro technology centre with about 500 high-qualification jobs. Kaunas University of Technology, Vytautas Magnus University, and the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences host well over 25,000 students between them, KTU anchors one of the country's main laser and photonics research lines, and Kauno klinikos, the largest hospital in Lithuania, employs almost 8,000 staff. Lithuania ranks first in the EU for young people joining the ICT sector, feeding a deep, English-working talent base.

Kaunas firms deploying AI for production and supplier coordination, quality and batch documentation, multilingual customer service, logistics and warehouse operations, and back-office workflow are pulling ahead of peers still running everything by hand. A manufacturing-engineering culture, a university-fed talent pool, and EU and Lithuanian data residency under VDAI supervision make Kaunas one of the highest-leverage cities in the Baltics to deploy production AI under GDPR and the EU AI Act.