AI within the Flanders Investment and Trade organisation

This information was sourced from the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (2026): PSTW: Public Sector Tech Watch latest dataset of selected cases. [Dataset] doi: 10.2905/JRC.J1MWC9R PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/e8e7bddd-8510-4936-9fa6-7e1b399cbd92. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).

Flanders Investment and Trade (FIT) is the trade promotion organisation (TPO) of Flanders, a region of Belgium. TPOs are facilitative agencies that promote and stimulate trade by providing information, linkages, technical advice, marketing and policy advocacy.

Answering ‘trade cases’ is one of the core business activities of FIT. A ‘trade case’ is a question from a Flemish company about a foreign market, that concerns the services of FIT, for example inquiries about the size or customs of a local market, potential foreign business partners, trade regulations or barriers, subsidies or market opportunities.

The existing digital tools (before the AI adoption) for answering trade cases consisted of Microsoft Dynamics as a CRM software, used for receiving, assigning and answering incoming questions, and Microsoft SharePoint as a collaborative document management and storage system, used for storing relevant information on local markets, partners and regulations, and for storing documents drawn up for previous cases.

The studied algorithm is aimed at partly automating the process of answering trade cases. Using natural language processing, trained on a large dataset of past trade questions and answers, the algorithm was designed to retrieve past answers to frequently-asked routine questions. It acts as an AI-powered search engine, not just comparing individual words, but interpreting the entire body of the question to find the most relevant answer. The AI suggestions were integrated into the CRM system as an extra tab on the CRM screen displaying the information on the incoming question.

Budget: Not disclosed