Overview

Vietnam Customs operates under the Ministry of Finance and manages the supervision, inspection, and control of goods, transport, and passengers across Vietnam's border checkpoints. As international trade has grown rapidly, so has demand for policy guidance, procedures, and operational support from businesses.

With a small support team facing hundreds of daily requests and constantly evolving regulations, response times had stretched from hours to days, especially for complex cases.

Vietnam Customs partnered with TechX to design and deploy an AI-powered virtual assistant built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using generative AI to provide businesses and customs officers with instant, self-service access to regulations and cut response times from days to seconds.

This has helped them to alleviate pressure, reduce backlogs and speed up request resolution times and is part of Vietnam Customs' broader vision to become a "Digital Customs, Smart Customs" administration.

Challenge: When support demand far exceeded manual processing capacity

Vietnam Customs' support department is staffed by a team of six to seven officers working 16-hour rotational shifts, seven days a week. Through its hotline and support email, the department receives up to 400 inquiries per day, with peak periods generating more than 10,000 emails per month alone.

Despite continuous operations, the team still accumulates a daily backlog of up to 200 or more unanswered calls and up to 300 unresolved and unread emails. For businesses seeking guidance on procedures, tax rates, or HS codes, this meant wait times stretching from hours to days, with complex cases taking even longer.

Volume is only part of the problem. Customs regulations are continuously updated with new decrees, circulars, and official guidance letters. Finding the correct regulation, HS code, or tax rate is time-consuming for both officers and businesses, and the margin for error is slim.

Adding headcount could not keep pace with demand growth. Vietnam Customs chose instead to apply AI to serve businesses directly, automating information lookup and expanding service availability to 24/7 without increasing administrative staffing.

Solution | Building a 24/7 AI assistant powered by Amazon Bedrock

To address this, Vietnam Customs and TechX designed and deployed a self-service AI assistant on AWS using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture. The assistant serves as a 24/7 first point of contact for businesses and customs officers alike, allowing users to ask questions in Vietnamese and receive near-instant responses with citations to the relevant legal source documents. It also proactively suggests related questions to help users approach issues comprehensively.

TechX built the solution around four core pillars:

Digitizing and standardizing the knowledge base

The first step was building a structured knowledge base of customs legal documents, including decrees, circulars, official letters, and FAQs, embedded and indexed in a vector store. To ensure accuracy in a public-sector environment, TechX established a human-in-the-loop expert review mechanism with version control, minimizing the risk of AI hallucination and ensuring every response carries legal reliability.

Cloud-native architecture for performance and automation

The system maintains stable performance even during traffic surges and keeps its knowledge base continuously up to date without manual effort.

It runs on a fully managed, cloud-native architecture on AWS, using Amazon Bedrock for generative AI inference with Anthropic's Claude models. Traffic routes through Amazon API Gateway and Application Load Balancer before reaching Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for processing. The knowledge base follows an event-driven architecture: when a new legal document is uploaded to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, Amazon EventBridge automatically triggers an AWS Lambda function to ingest and process it.

Specialized data management with the highest security standards

The system provides end-to-end observability and meets rigorous public-sector security requirements.

At its core, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with pgvector powers vector search for accurate retrieval of legal knowledge. Amazon DynamoDB manages session and conversation state for multi-turn conversations. Amazon S3 serves as the storage foundation for knowledge data, golden-question sets, and system logs. The entire data flow is monitored through Amazon CloudWatch, with metrics feeding into Amazon Quick Sight dashboards for real-time operational visibility.

For security, the system runs within an isolated, Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) VPC with a web application firewall (F5 WAF) and Amazon Private Link for internal communication. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies follow least-privilege principles, with credentials managed through AWS Secrets Manager. All data at rest is encrypted with AES-256, and SSO/IdP integration is planned for production.

Roadmap for feature expansion

Vietnam Customs and TechX plan to evolve the system toward a multi-agent orchestration model. In this next phase, a Tasks-Master agent will coordinate dedicated Analysis, RAG, and Summary agents through an MCP tool server, enabling more complex, multi-step tasks as demand grows. The architecture also allows for an automated Helpdesk ticket agent: when a question exceeds the AI's knowledge scope, the assistant will automatically collect case information, confirm with the user, and route it to the appropriate officer for resolution.

Outcome | Optimizing processing time and enhancing flexible scalability on demand

Because businesses can now self-serve around the clock, straightforward inquiries are absorbed automatically, directly reducing the daily backlog.

In two months of deployment, the assistant received and responded to over 53,000 questions across more than 14,400 conversations, averaging over 1,450 questions answered per day. On its busiest day to-date, the system handled over 3,300 questions without interruption.

Where businesses previously spent 10 to 15 minutes looking up documents manually, the assistant now delivers responses in three to four seconds, with a technical success rate above 99% and 24/7 availability. Each response includes citations to the relevant legal documents, giving users an immediate basis for verification.

The results demonstrate the solution's ability to scale with growing demand from both customs officers and the business community, allowing Vietnam Customs to meet rising support needs without expanding its organizational structure.

"During the pilot phase, the system processed more than 53,000 queries, achieving a 3–4 second response time and over 99% system availability, effectively meeting the business requirement of the Customs sector." — Nguyen Minh Tuan, Deputy Head, Department of IT & Customs Statistics, Vietnam Customs.

About Vietnam Customs

Vietnam Customs operates under the Ministry of Finance and is responsible for enforcing customs laws and regulations nationwide. Vietnam Customs manages the entire import-export process, oversees imported and exported goods and means of transport, and carries out anti-smuggling and trade-fraud prevention work to protect national interests and promote international trade.