Terry — the Philippines' Bureau of Internal Revenue Builds an AI Tax-Research Assistant With Ayala

On 25 August 2026, BIR Commissioner Charlito Martin R. Mendoza and Ayala Corporation's Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Group Head Karl Kendrick Chua signed a Memorandum of Agreement to jointly build 'Terry', an AI assistant intended to help BIR personnel search, cross-reference and analyse tax laws, rulings and official issuances. Under the six-month, no-cost collaboration, Ayala builds and helps set up the tool while BIR staff take part in its testing, validation and refinement, with a knowledge-transfer plan meant to let BIR institutionalise and run Terry itself afterwards.
The design goal is a structured, searchable internal knowledge base that gives citation-based, source-grounded answers drawn from official BIR references, rather than open-ended generation. Philippine commentary on the initiative has noted that the agency has stressed final investigative judgments and enforcement decisions will remain with human revenue officers, with AI limited to research support.
As of this review, Terry is still in its build-and-pilot phase rather than a completed, evaluated deployment: there are no published results yet on how much staff time it saves, how accurate its outputs are, or how it performs once rolled out beyond the initial testing group.

Read the full analysis: https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2294362/bir-ayala-corp-to-develop-ai-powered-tax-ai-assistant