Consulate AI

Consulate AI replaces a chronically overwhelmed call center with a WhatsApp-based assistant that now serves more than twenty thousand users a year for the Colombian Consulate in Chicago, cutting response times by thirty percent and fully automating routine information requests across two languages. Serving as Product Manager and Lead Developer meant first correctly diagnosing the failure mode before writing a single line of code: the consulate was not struggling with technical complexity but with sheer repetition, the same handful of questions, the same appointment logistics, the same documentation requirements, asked and mishandled thousands of times over by people who kept arriving unprepared and leaving frustrated. Interviews with consulate staff and consultants surfaced the exact shape of that repetition, which then became the architecture for a system built on the GPT-4 API, routed through Flask, and delivered over WhatsApp via Twilio, a channel chosen precisely because it required nothing new of the people using it. The rollout moved through sandbox prototyping, usability testing with real consulate visitors, staff training, and documentation before reaching full production, a sequence that treated the technology as the easy part and the operational integration as the real engineering challenge.