World Consumer Rights Day, celebrated annually on 15 March, traces its origins back to 1962 when US President John F. Kennedy enshrined consumer rights in a landmark address to Congress. His speech laid the foundation for a global movement advocating for fair treatment, safety, and transparency in customer experiences. Over the decades, the recognition of consumer rights has expanded beyond traditional commerce into digital economies and artificial intelligence.
However, recent disruptions such as the abrupt shutdowns of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and USAID highlight the vulnerability of consumer protection efforts. These events reinforce the need for scalable, AI-driven solutions that can continue providing critical consumer support amid periods of instability.
These new challenges are also present in emerging markets like the Philippines, where digital transactions and financial scams are increasing exponentially. With rapid AI developments reshaping customer experiences, enterprises and governments must ensure that AI supports — not undermines — consumer rights.
Proto’s origin in AI customer experience? The Philippines 🇵🇭
Proto deliberately chose the Philippines as its primary market due to the country's unique digital and linguistic landscape. With an internet penetration rate of 73.6% and a digital economy valued at ₱2.05 trillion, the nation is one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing tech hubs. Its AI adoption — projected to surpass $1 billion by 2025 — makes it an ideal environment for building customer experience automation.
Additionally, the Philippines’ underserved linguistic diversity, where languages like Tagalog, Cebuano, and Ilocano are widely spoken, presented an opportunity for Proto to develop inclusive natural language processing. The country’s established contact centre industry provided a real-world testing ground for Proto’s AI-driven usecases:
- Consumer Protection: Proto collaborated with Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and then the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) to automate consumer complaints, improving regulatory oversights and efficiency across more than 30 government agencies.
- Customer Experience: Proto deployed AI assistant for leading Filipino financial and healthcare businesses, such as PhilCare, where AI handled over 2.6 million interactions annually, significantly improving customer satisfaction and response times.
- Employee Experience: Proto optimised internal support systems through AI assistants that streamline HR processes, payroll inquiries, and workplace support, reducing manual workload for employees and improving workplace efficiency.
- Indoor Navigation: Proto is piloting an AI-powered indoor navigation assistant at Mactan-Cebu International Airport, helping passengers find flights and amenities through their messaging apps. This innovation merges online and indoor customer experiences for healthcare, retail and transit hubs.
The AI consumer protection usecase, in particular, has since attracted support from organisations such as the University of Cambridge SupTech Lab, Gates Foundation, and African Development Bank, which recognise its importance and scalability for countering financial threats in developing countries.
Beyond usecase development, the Philippines is also where Proto tests new AI technology before deployment into its clients across Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In 2025, Proto is rolling out advanced voice AI for low-resource languages such as Cebuano and Ilocano, social media sentiment correlation with customer cases, and secure knowledge management capabilities for government agencies.
From startup to AI consumer rights pioneer
Proto’s inception stemmed from CEO Curtis Matlock’s firsthand experience working with Philippine contact centres, where he identified a recurring issue: AI chatbots struggled to serve local and mixed languages like Taglish, an English-Tagalog hybrid. This challenge inspired the company’s early AI development, focusing on training language models to handle code-switching and cross-lingual interactions — where customers seamlessly shift between languages within a single conversation.
Over the years, Philippines private and public sector clients drove Proto to build out its AICX platform beyond AI assistants to include livechat, ticketing, CRM, analytics and critical privacy features such as on-premise hosting and data anonymisation.
The backbone of this technology is ProtoAI, its proprietary natural language understanding (NLU) engine designed to augment large language models (LLMs) for local languages. Unlike traditional AI models, ProtoAI ensures that automation understands linguistic nuances, including non-standard phrasing commonly found in Filipino consumer interactions.
Generative AI: Threat or opportunity for local consumers?
The rise of generative AI brings both promise and risk to customer experience and consumer rights in linguistically diverse countries like the Philippines.
Many generative AI models are built using datasets that prioritise widely spoken global languages, often neglecting low-resource languages. This bias threatens linguistic diversity and risks sidelining non-English consumers. Reports warn that dominant AI models risk marginalising local languages, reinforcing digital exclusion rather than bridging linguistic gaps.
Proto’s commitment to inclusive AI ensures that local languages are not only preserved but actively integrated into digital services. ProtoAI acts to protect consumers from being left out of AI-driven services, ensuring that automation works for everyone, regardless of language preference.
As the global regulatory landscape shifts and digital economies grow, AI must be a force for consumer empowerment. However, recent threats to consumer rights such as the shutdown of global consumer protection programs supported by USAID — including in the Philippines — in the face of the growing $1 trillion financial scam industry, highlight the vulnerability of consumer protection efforts when dependent on traditional funding models.
In response to this instability, Proto and the Gates Foundation developed the shared service model, first implemented in the Philippines, to offer a sustainable solution to the vulnerability of consumer protection systems in times of political and economic instability.
This model allows multiple stakeholders — including government agencies, financial regulators, and consumer protection commissions — to pool resources and collectively maintain critical software deployments. By distributing costs and responsibilities across participants, the shared service model ensures continuity of consumer rights protection even when individual organisations face funding cuts or operational challenges.
On this World Consumer Rights Day, Proto reaffirms its commitment to making AI work for everyone — bridging linguistic divides and ultimately safeguarding consumers in the age of generative AI.
The Philippines has shown what's possible when AI is developed with inclusivity at its core and deployed through procurement that prioritise sustainability. As AI and political instability impact consumer rights, Proto will continue to implement technology and funding models that guarantee inclusive and trustworthy customer experience.
