The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has launched a platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to centralize the agency’s legal, budget and administrative documents.
On Thursday, the DBM kicked off the Managed Intelligent Network for Advanced Insights (MINAI) as part of its push for digital transformation.
Undersecretary Maria Francesca Del Rosario, head of the Information and Communications Technology Group, said MINAI represents a ‘strategic leap forward’ in managing, accessing and protecting knowledge in public financial management.
Del Rosario said the systems aims to store institutional knowledge and outdated and fragmented documents in an interactive, AI-enabled central knowledge system accessible anytime and anywhere.
It features intelligent search capabilities, a chatbot interface and robust security controls to allow DBM employees to quickly retrieve verified and up-to-date information.
Del Rosario said DBM employees themselves will train the AI, contribute to its knowledge pool and validate the information it learns,’ Del Rosario said. ‘This ensures that our institutional knowledge remains accurate and reliable even as leadership and personnel evolve.’
MINAI also runs on NVIDIA GPUs, advanced computing chips that enable artificial intelligence to perform complex processing.
Del Rosario said the DBM is among the first government institutions globally to use these chips for large-language model applications similar to ChatGPT, though MINAI remains entirely secure and self-contained.
‘We have to also anticipate that AI is here already and we have to upskill and capacitate our DBM employees to become an AI-enabled workforce,’ Del Rosario said, adding that employees must know how to do from engineering to train and validate AI models.
Meanwhile, Budget Secretary Amenah F. Pangandaman said MINAI is not just another system or tool-it makes the daily work in DBM easier, faster and more reliable.
Pangandaman said documents in the DBM are often scattered across different systems and folders, and finding them has resulted in wasted time, repeated work and confusion about which documents remain valid.
‘Through MINAI, we are making DBM a leader in serving the Filipino people with greater transparency, accountability, and efficiency,’ Pangandaman said.
‘Digitalization is our best way forward. It is the key to improving bureaucratic efficiency and ensuring sound fiscal management,’ she added.
The DBM’s ongoing digitalization efforts include the Budget and Treasury Management System, the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS), Project DIME, and public dashboards that track budget details from the National Expenditure Program to the General Appropriations Act.
For this year, the DBM allotted P72.08 billion to support the ICT-related programs and projects of government agencies. This is higher by 11.6 percent than the P64.6 billion in the 2024 national budget.
The agency also earmarked P1.36 billion for cybersecurity for 2025, a whopping 315- percent increase from P330 million in 2024, to ensure the ‘safe and seamless implementation of government’s digitalization efforts.’