DTI automates citizen queries across 6 functional groups

Six functional groups, one entry point

The Department of Trade and Industry serves as the Philippines' primary hub for trade regulation, consumer protection, and business development. With enquiries arriving from citizens, entrepreneurs, and foreign investors across six distinct functional groups – each with its own remit, policies, and responsible team – the DTI faced a structural routing problem. Agents handling contact centre queries could not reliably identify which group a citizen's question belonged to, and the volume of incoming calls and emails created delays that extended well beyond business hours.

The DTI's response was to deploy TIA (Trade & Industry Assistant), an AI agent built on Proto's platform to automate citizen support across all six groups simultaneously – and to implement its No Wrong Door policy at scale.

Routing without the bottleneck

Before TIA, citizens who contacted the DTI had no guarantee their query would reach the right team. Different departments – covering areas such as business name registration, consumer complaints, and fair trade enforcement – each handled their own enquiries, but there was no unified intake layer to direct citizens accurately on first contact.

TIA changed this by operating as a single digital entry point across all six functional groups. Citizens interact with one assistant, and their query is automatically classified and routed to the responsible group. For queries that cannot be resolved automatically, TIA directs citizens to the correct channel rather than leaving them to navigate the department's structure themselves.

This is the operational expression of the DTI's No Wrong Door policy: no citizen is turned away or bounced between departments because they contacted the wrong team first.

Consumer complaints

The most operationally significant use case in TIA's deployment is consumer complaints intake. Citizens filing a complaint – about a business, a product, or a trade practice – go through a guided conversational flow that collects the relevant details before the case is routed to the responsible authority.

TIA integrates with the DTI's eCARES web portal via API, which handles distribution of complaints to the appropriate functional group for resolution. This means that from the citizen's perspective, a complaint filed through chat moves directly into the DTI's case management infrastructure – without requiring a visit, a phone call, or a form submission via email.

100% of citizen complaints are now processed through this automated flow, without manual intervention at the intake stage.

Business registration and trade enquiries

A significant share of DTI queries come from entrepreneurs seeking to register a business name, understand licensing requirements, or navigate the process for e-commerce compliance. These enquiries are often repetitive in structure and well-suited to automation – but they vary enough in detail that a rigid FAQ approach falls short.

TIA handles these through intent-based conversations that cover the DTI's most common informational topics across its functional groups: business name registration, consumer rights, fair trade rules, and e-commerce adoption guidance. Citizens receive answers in seconds rather than waiting for an agent to become available – and because TIA operates 24/7, foreign investors and stakeholders in different time zones can access support outside Philippine business hours.

Local language support across five languages

The Philippines is one of the most linguistically diverse markets in Southeast Asia. Citizens across different regions speak different primary languages, and government services that communicate only in English or formal Filipino leave a significant share of the population underserved.

TIA supports Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, and Kapampangan alongside English – covering a broad cross-section of the regional languages spoken by citizens who contact the DTI. This multilingual capability is built into the same agent handling all six functional groups, so citizens are not routed to a separate language-specific channel; they simply interact in the language they are most comfortable with.

Three years of deployment, 720,000 interactions a year

TIA has operated on Proto's platform through three years of continuous deployment. In the most recent year, TIA handled 720,000 citizen interactions – a 68% increase year-on-year – with an average response time of six seconds.

The DTI's adoption of AI-enabled citizen support predated many comparable government deployments in the Philippines, and TIA remains one of the most established examples of AI applied to multi-department government services in the region. Its No Wrong Door architecture – a single agent routing accurately across six specialised groups in five local languages – continues to serve as a reference model for the broader Philippine government's citizen experience agenda.