Ai4
Deploying evolutionary metaprompting across internal multi-agent workflows eliminates large language model variability, allowing research organizations to scale contract bidding and revenue without heavy capital spending.
AI-assisted summary of Bottom-up Innovation: Boosting Collaborative Product Development with AI — original source. Check the original for full context.
Source published:
Detailed notes
## Background Published on YouTube by Ai4 on August 26, 2025, this presentation features Miguel Ángel Castán Lascorz and Luis Luengo from CIRCE Technology Center. The session details how CIRCE applied artificial intelligence internally through an open innovation challenge called the AI Olympics, highlighting their proposal-evaluating assistant, La Ofertadora.
## TL;DR To free technical staff from tedious administrative proposal tasks, CIRCE Technology Center organized a four-month internal competition called the AI Olympics, where cross-functional teams developed practical AI prototypes. The top solution, La Ofertadora, automates RFP web scraping, document analysis, internal capacity matching, and pricing. To resolve nondeterministic variability across multi-agent pipelines without sacrificing contextual inference, the team developed an evolutionary metaprompting algorithm that iteratively optimizes prompts for stability and quality. The deployment scaled CIRCE's detected tender opportunities from dozens to over 3,000, establishing a replicable blueprint for low-cost, bottom-up AI adoption.
## Atmosphere & style The presentation carries an energetic, pragmatic, and collaborative vibe, seamlessly blending local pride in Zaragoza's tech ecosystem with real-world AI engineering challenges. Castán Lascorz and Luengo deliver a polished, accessible pitch that balances technical depth—such as agent orchestrations and evolutionary Pareto frontiers—with relatable workplace frustrations. The session feels both grounded and inspiring, demonstrating how open internal experimentation can ignite genuine organizational transformation without massive capital expenditure.
## Key takeaways - [00:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=4s) Manual RFP tracking previously consumed excessive engineering time, prompting CIRCE to automate opportunity discovery and let technical staff focus on core sustainability projects. - [01:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=96s) CIRCE Technology Center drives European sustainability initiatives by uniting multidisciplinary teams across energy, digitalization, and environmental sciences. - [04:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=262s) The internal 'AI Olympics' established a four-month bottom-up open innovation framework, giving employees dedicated company time to develop AI solutions for real operational needs. - [04:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=262s) The competition yielded diverse AI prototypes, addressing challenges such as vineyard irrigation optimization, bird migration mapping for wind farms, and smart traffic signal control. - [07:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=442s) Top-performing tool 'La Ofertadora' was built as a multi-agent pipeline automating tender scraping, document analysis, internal skill matching, and pricing calculations. - [07:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=442s) Production deployment exposed a fundamental LLM consistency dilemma: raw models introduced cascading non-deterministic errors, while rigid hyperparameter caps destroyed reasoning capability. - [10:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=652s) CIRCE resolved agent inconsistency using Evolutive Metaprompting, an approach where meta-agents iteratively mutate and score prompt variations against quality and stability benchmarks. - [10:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=652s) Evolutionary prompt optimization preserves white-box transparency, generating inspectable natural language instructions that automatically adapt as underlying AI models evolve. - [15:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=907s) The operationalization of La Ofertadora expanded CIRCE's identified opportunities from under 100 to over 3,000, projecting a 9x revenue increase. - [15:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=907s) Transformative organizational AI adoption does not demand massive capital expenditure, but rather strategic agility, bottom-up empowerment, and a culture of experimentation.
## Detailed walkthrough ### [00:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=4s) Rethinking How Time Is Spent on Green Projects
Miguel Ángel Castán Lascorz and Luis Luengo open the presentation by asking the audience a central question: "How much time do you spend thinking green?" As project managers at CIRCE Technology Center in Spain specializing in energy flexibility, they realized that an enormous portion of their working hours was consumed by hunting down potential opportunities, reviewing fragmented sources of information, and determining whether incoming Requests for Proposals (RFPs) fit the capabilities of their multidisciplinary teams. This left far too little time to actually execute the green, sustainable projects they cared about.
Last year, CIRCE identified 22 interesting RFPs manually, spending an average of eight minutes analyzing each document. To eliminate this bottleneck, they created **La Ofertadora** (the "RFPs analyzer"). Since its rollout, the system identified 131 relevant opportunities in just one minute via an automated, single-click workflow, freeing up technical staff to focus on substantive sustainability work.
- **Manual baseline:** 22 RFPs identified last year at an average of 8 minutes spent analyzing each. - **La Ofertadora efficiency:** 131 RFPs identified in 1 minute with a single click.
---
[01:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=96s) Zaragoza and CIRCE Technology Center
The presenters welcome the audience to Zaragoza, Spain. Acknowledging common stereotypes of Spain—paella, sangria, and beaches—they playfully clarify that Zaragoza is known for different landmarks, notably the Basilica del Pilar and the Ebro River. Connected deeply to water since ancient Roman times, Zaragoza hosted the World Expo in 2008. Today, the city is in the midst of a modern technological revolution and is slated to host the largest data center in Southern Europe.
CIRCE Technology Center embodies this regional transformation. Its mission is to convert environmental challenges into innovation opportunities across three pillars: energy, sustainability, and digitalization. CIRCE employs over 300 professionals spanning diverse disciplines—including chemists, architects, data scientists, software developers, and laboratory technicians—driven by the belief that high-impact solutions arise when cross-disciplinary teams collaborate.
Beyond internal software, CIRCE leads several prominent European technological initiatives: - **REDOL:** Leverages AI, robotics, and advanced recycling to recover materials from urban waste, supporting cities in achieving climate neutrality by 2040. - **ELECTRA:** Electrifies high-temperature industrial furnaces using electrode, induction heating, and microwave technologies. - **EFFORT:** Strengthens the cyber resilience of energy infrastructure using AI and self-healing systems to mitigate risks and speed up disaster recovery. - **INCIT-EV:** Develops Europe's first dynamic wireless charging lane for electric vehicles.
---
[04:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=262s) Bottom-Up Innovation: The AI Olympics
Reflecting on their client-facing R&D work, CIRCE's leadership and staff asked: "What if we apply the same innovation that we provide to our clients, to ourselves?" and "What if we can exploit the full power of AI into our multidisciplinary projects?" To answer how to operationalize this, CIRCE's board launched the **AI Olympics**—a four-month internal bottom-up open innovation competition.
Teams were given dedicated company time to collaborate across departments and build AI-powered prototypes targeting real operational and market challenges. This framework produced multiple validated solutions: - **BIVAR:** A vineyard irrigation optimization mobile app that predicts water needs via deep learning and delivers irrigation recommendations to growers over WhatsApp, delivering up to 20% water savings without compromising grape quality. - **ONGUARD:** Predicts shifts in bird populations in response to climate change up to 25 years into the future, providing distribution maps so wind farm planners can avoid high-impact habitats and prevent regulatory conflicts. - **VALTIR:** Evaluates the State of Health (SoH) of electric vehicle batteries simply by plugging the vehicle into a smart charger. - **DRAGON:** Dynamically optimizes the real-time capacity and throughput of power transmission lines. - **SAFETRA:** Uses computer vision at pedestrian crossings to infer crossing intent and dynamically modulate traffic lights, cutting traffic congestion and saving an estimated 10 tons of $\text{CO}_2$ per traffic light point each month.
---
[07:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=442s) La Ofertadora Architecture & The LLM Consistency Problem
La Ofertadora emerged as the overall champion of the AI Olympics. Designed to streamline technical proposal development, the tool crawls public tender sites, analyzes extensive specifications, matches task requirements against internal staff skills, and calculates competitive pricing.
``` +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Multi-Agent System | | | | +------------------+ +------------------+ | | | Web Scraping & | --> | Doc Analysis & | | | | Auto-Download | | Info Extraction | | | +------------------+ +--------+---------+ | | | | | v | | +------------------+ +------------------+ | | | Pricing Context | <-- | Capacity Matcher | | | | & Estimation | | (Team Assignment)| | | +--------+---------+ +------------------+ | | | | | +------------------------+ | | v | | +-----------------------+ | | | Orchestrator Pipeline | | | +-----------+-----------+ | +------------------------------------|-------------------------------+ v +-------------------------+ | Final Evaluation Report | +-------------------------+ ```
Despite initial success, the team ran into a major production hurdle common to large language models (LLMs): nondeterministic variability. When evaluating identical proposal requirements, the assignment agent would intermittently change team alignment scores or suggest entirely different technical units. This variability cascaded across downstream agents, leading to extreme output uncertainty.
While lowering temperature or tuning decoding hyperparameters forced determinism, it made the models rigid and destroyed the "spark of inference" necessary for contextual synthesis. The presenters emphasized the classic dilemma: "We cannot kill creativity, but we need to guide it." Manually engineering prompts for every agent combination was impractical, driving them to find an automated approach.
---
[10:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=652s) Evolutionary Metaprompting
Inspired by a *Nature* publication, CIRCE designed **Evolutive Metaprompting**, using AI agents to iteratively evaluate and rewrite the prompts of other operational agents.
``` +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Evolutive Metaprompting Loop | | | | +--------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Initial Population: Prompt Variations & Hyperparams | | | +---------------------------+----------------------------+ | | | | | v | | +--------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Multi-Objective Evaluation: Consistency vs Quality | | | +---------------------------+----------------------------+ | | | | | v | | +--------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Selection: Identify Pareto-Optimal Prompt Candidates | | | +---------------------------+----------------------------+ | | | | | v | | +--------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Meta-Prompt Agent: Mutation & Crossover of Prompts | | | +---------------------------+----------------------------+ | | | | | +--- (Repeat for N Generations) | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ```
The system pairs operational agents (e.g., the team-assignment agent) with a meta-agent acting as an automated prompt engineer. Starting from an initial population of prompt structures and parameters, candidates are tested against historical proposal benchmarks and scored on both output quality and consistency.
Top-performing instructions undergo evolutionary crossover and mutation, guided by the meta-agent. Over successive generations, prompts migrate toward the Pareto-optimal top-right quadrant (high accuracy, high stability). The resulting instructions abandoned brittle, rigid rule lists in favor of balanced prompt structures that preserve reasoning flexibility while enforcing strict deterministic constraints.
Key benefits of this approach include: - **Adaptive automation:** Continuously optimizes prompts even as underlying models, APIs, or data schemas evolve. - **System-wide robustness:** Prevents cascading errors across multi-agent pipelines. - **White-box transparency:** Output prompts remain natural text that engineers can inspect, audit, and supervise.
---
[15:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=907s) Business Impact and Cultural Transformation
The deployment of La Ofertadora drastically expanded CIRCE's commercial and grant pipeline: - **Opportunities detected:** Grew from 86 manually identified opportunities in the prior year to more than 3,000 using La Ofertadora. - **Proposal submissions:** Expanded from 45 submitted proposals to an addressable contribution capacity of approximately 1,600. - **Project wins:** Increased the potential win volume from 5 historical victories up to nearly 200 successful bids. - **Financial and organizational growth:** Projections indicate a 9x increase in annual line-of-business revenue and the creation of roughly 60 new technical jobs.
Luis and Miguel Ángel conclude by underscoring that applying AI internally proved that transformative innovation does not require massive capital expenditure—it requires "vision, agility, and a culture open to experimentation and learning." The AI Olympics evolved beyond a internal competition into an organizational catalyst, demonstrating that "when a technology center turns its intelligence inward, it unlocks a multiplier effect" across technological, human, and environmental domains.
## Notable quotes > [00:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=4s) How much time do you spend thinking green? — Miguel Ángel Castán Lascorz
> What happens when a technology center decides to apply artificial intelligence... to itself?
> [04:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=262s) What if we apply the same innovation that we provide to our clients, to ourselves?
> [04:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=262s) What if we can exploit the full power of AI into our multidisciplinary projects?
> [07:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=442s) We cannot kill creativity, but we need to guide it.
> [15:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=907s) vision, agility, and a culture open to experimentation and learning.
> [15:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8&t=907s) when a technology center turns its intelligence inward, it unlocks a multiplier effect
> a replicable model of bottom-up innovation that turns AI into a catalyst for real change.
## Mentioned Miguel Ángel Castán Lascorz, Luis Luengo, CIRCE Technology Center, Ai4, La Ofertadora, AI Olympics, Zaragoza, Basilica del Pilar, Ebro River, World Expo 2008, REDOL, ELECTRA, EFFORT, INCIT-EV, BIVAR, ONGUARD, VALTIR, DRAGON, SAFETRA, Nature, Evolutive Metaprompting
## Video description Miguel Angel Castan Lascorz, Project Manager in AI-based solutions for energy efficiency and sustainability, CIRCE Technology Center Luis Luengo, Project Manager, CIRCE Technology Center
Abstracts
What happens when a technology center decides to apply artificial intelligence... to itself? In this talk, I’ll share how CIRCE launched its first internal AI Olympics—an open innovation challenge where multidisciplinary teams developed AI-based solutions for real organizational needs. I’ll walk you through the process, the outcomes, and our most successful solution: La Ofertadora, an AI-powered assistant that’s transforming how we prepare R&D proposals. You’ll learn how AI became a practical, strategic tool within our daily workflows—without requiring massive investment. Join us to discover a replicable model of bottom-up innovation that turns AI into a catalyst for real change.
[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgM4WSIfdE8)