In CERENA's 20 years seminar series, this month, Professor Gustavo Paneiro talks about "Scaling Intelligence: AI Solutions for the Natural Stone Industry".

This seminar addresses a question that the natural stone industry can no longer afford to ignore: how can cutting-edge technology be harnessed without losing what makes stone unique? The AIStone4.0 project, developed at CERENA under the Sustainable Stone by Portugal green agenda (PRR), tackles this challenge head-on by deploying an AI pipeline — including generative AI — to predict vein patterns in marble slabs straight from the raw quarry block, before any cutting takes place. The practical implications are significant: smarter cutting decisions, less wasted material, and a more sustainable use of a finite natural resource. Stonify, a Portuguese technology startup, takes this research further by embedding it within a broader commercial ecosystem of hardware and software tools designed to digitalise and trace stone blocks and slabs along the entire value chain — from quarry operators to architects and end buyers. What emerges from this seminar is not simply a showcase of two projects, but a working model of how university research and industry can genuinely build something together