Independent Commission for Infrastructure chairman Andres Reyes Jr., the former Court of Appeals presiding justice once known for slicing through case backlogs with quiet efficiency, is now helping build a new kind of remedy for bureaucratic gridlock.
A self confessed geek who once tamed towering stacks of case files, Reyes is channeling that same discipline into artificial intelligence, presiding over the crafting a digital tool designed to hunt corruption in the country’s vast infrastructure program.
At the Manila Overseas Press Club on Thursday night, Reyes introduced Project SENTRI, short for Synchronized, Evidence and Network Tracing for Reporting and Intelligence. The system, now under development, is envisioned as an AI-aided case builder for anomalous infrastructure projects.
Instead of lawyers and auditors spending months reconstructing trails of contracts, variation orders and billing statements, SENTRI would ingest massive datasets, flag irregular patterns, map relationships among contractors and officials, and surface red flags in minutes.
“Everything is data,” Reyes told an audience that include media practitioners, business leaders, and diplomats. “And AI will help…Project Sentri is an AI-aided case builder that is now being developed by ICI,” he added.
Even the sharpest legal mind has limits, he noted. “If it is just one case, you may not need a computer. But if it is 20,000 to 30,000 cases…we can’t trust our memory.”
And the numbers explain the urgency. The commission was created by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. last September following the P1.7 trillion flood control controversy, with a mandate to review infrastructure projects dating back to 2016. That means combing through 238,200 projects, nearly half of them roads and flood control works.
Of the 29,800 flood control projects undertaken between 2018 and 2024, Reyes said only around 8,000 have been validated so far by the ICI, slowed by limited manpower and the recent departure of two of the three commissioners. Reyes, for now, stands alone at the helm.
Whether the commission continues beyond its initial mandate remains uncertain. But if it does, Project SENTRI could mark a shift from paper-driven investigations to data driven accountability.
Corruption is estimated in various studies to cost the economy as much as P1.4 trillion annually, a sum more than enough to irrigate the country’s 1.2 million hectares of irrigable land, ensuring food security and rice self sufficiency, helping steady inflation and ultimately supporting a better-fed nation.
Even incremental gains in detection and deterrence, Reyes points out, could ripple far beyond courtrooms and commission hearings, reshaping how public money is protected and how public trust is restored.
