Smart partners with Avtica to make AI tools accessible and affordable for Filipinos

Smart Communications Inc., the wireless arm of PLDT Inc., is partnering with AI orchestration platform Avtica to make AI tools more accessible and affordable for Filipinos. At a press briefing in Makati City on Tuesday, Smart Communications and Avtica launched AI.Smart —a full AI workspace available to Smart and TNT subscribers at a starter tier costing P49, valid for seven days. Other credit packs are priced at P99, valid for 14 days; and Pro and Max priced at P149 and P499, respectively, both valid for 30 days which can be shared by a team or family. "AI.Smart puts a real AI assistant right beside it, one that understands Filipino, respects your privacy, and can be paid for through your existing prepaid or postpaid account. At P49 for a week, a student can get help with exam preparation or a research paper, a freelancer can turn client notes into a polished proposal, and a family can plan a trip, a budget, or a celebration. That is a Smart advantage we want every subscriber to have, not just those who can afford an expensive subscription,” said Lloyd Manaloto, first vice president and head of Strategy and Corporate Brand at Smart Communications. Manaloto pointed out that most AI tools cost around $20 a month and require a credit card while most people in the Philippines are prepaid mobile users and many have never held a credit card, thus AI.Smart’s AI tools can be accessed like a “sachet” by Smart subscribers. AI.Smart runs in a dedicated Amazon Web Services (AWS) landing zone provisioned for Smart, with inference served through Amazon Bedrock. Under AI.Smart, subscribers get the right model for each task from a single platform, including Amazon Nova, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, OpenAI, and Thinking Machines. "This is how AI reaches everyone: not by waiting for prices to fall, but by building locally, pricing locally, and charging to the account people already have. The Philippines is first. The model travels,” said Winston Damarillo, CEO of Avtica. "We built Amazon Bedrock so that any builder, anywhere, can access the same frontier AI models that power the world’s largest companies. Amihan and Avtica used Bedrock to put those models to work for Filipino students, freelancers, and small-business owners—in their language, at a local price, charged to the mobile account they already have. When a student in Cebu can reach for the same AI tools as a developer in Seattle, that’s the democratization of technology in action,” said Precious Lim, country manager of AWS Philippines AI.Smart is now available to Smart and TNT subscribers at https://AI.Smart and in the LiveSmart app. Avtica is an AI company which builds localized AI products delivered in partnership with leading telecommunications and cloud providers. —AOL, GMA News