TIHU Assistant – AI Agent for Tokenized Local Economies

Visual identity of TIHU Assistant ( AI for local economies powered by blockchain and Web3.)

Inspiration

In many African regions, local communities struggle with limited access to financial services, planning tools, and digital infrastructures. The TIHU Project (Universal Human Industrial Work) is an initiative from GIE ESMC aiming to create tokenized economic ecosystems based on local income-generating activities (AGR), blockchain, and inclusive finance.

We wanted to build an intelligent assistant that would allow any community member, regardless of digital literacy, to interact with their economic rights and projects using natural language.

What it does

TIHU Assistant is an AI-powered conversational agent built with Google Cloud’s Agent Development Kit. It helps users:

Register and manage AGR (farming, retail, production)
Understand tokenized income and spending via NFT/FT (ERC-1155)
Plan development projects within the KSU ecosystem (Universal Solvency Kit)
Access educational content linked to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

How we built it

Agent Development Kit / Dialogflow CX for natural language
Firebase for real-time storage and user sessions
Spring Boot (Java) to manage API logic and secure endpoints
Web3j to interact with smart contracts on Polygon/BSC
IPFS + Pinata for decentralized file and metadata storage
RAG + GPT planned for context-aware responses in future phase

Challenges we ran into

Designing intents and flows for rural/non-technical users
Integrating blockchain concepts without overwhelming users
Creating a multilingual-friendly architecture

What we learned

We learned how to combine AI, cloud services, and decentralized tools to solve real-world problems. We also realized that low/no-code tools can accelerate development even with complex architectures.