Liepāja’s AI automation agency.

Liepaja is a Baltic port city of about 67,421 people, the third-largest city in Latvia and the largest in the Kurzeme region. Its defining asset is an ice-free harbour that runs year-round, anchoring the Liepaja Special Economic Zone (LSEZ), the only zone in the Baltics that combines a seaport, an industrial area and an international airport. The SEZ covers roughly 30 square kilometres, about 65% of the city, and reports production of around EUR 478.6 million with port cargo turnover above 7 million tonnes a year.

Industry here is concentrated and export-oriented. Caljan builds telescopic conveyors and cargo-handling automation from its largest facility worldwide, employing about 255 people. UPB, one of the largest industrial groups in the Baltics, manufactures advanced building elements. Metals remain central through firms such as TOLMETS and Jensen Metal, on the heritage of the former Liepajas Metalurgs steelworks, whose site is now slated for a green industrial park projected to create more than 3,000 jobs. Fisheries, food processing and agricultural machinery round out the base.

The newest growth story is offshore wind. The Latvia and Estonia ELWIND project targets up to 1,000 megawatts off the Kurzeme coast between Liepaja and Ventspils, and Van Oord is building an offshore-wind support base in the Port of Liepaja, with construction from 2026 and operation expected in mid-2027. NorSAF is planning a sustainable-aviation-fuel plant in the zone. Each of these creates document-heavy, multi-system operations: customs and port paperwork, supplier and contractor coordination, maintenance scheduling and compliance reporting, all running under EU rules.

For Liepaja operators, the fastest payback comes from automating the routine work that ties up skilled staff: port and customs documentation, manufacturing order and quality paperwork, multilingual customer service across Latvian, English and Russian, and back-office coordination between the systems a plant or terminal already runs. Firms deploying AI here move ahead of peers still keying it by hand, while keeping a regulator-ready audit trail under the Data State Inspectorate and the EU AI Act.