- Looking across operations —rather than individually—can reveal links that are easy to miss, especially as IDB country portfolios grow larger and more complex.
- In Belize, an agentic AI workflow reviewed 18 operations across the portfolio and pipeline and identified 101 potential directional relationships, pointing to possible synergies and areas where closer coordination across projects could be explored.
- The agentic AI tool also showed where those relationships tend to cluster: the operation focused on labor markets emerged as a key connector, with potential links to operations across several sectors.
Development challenges rarely fit neatly within a single project or sector. Yet country portfolios are often managed operation by operation, making it difficult for teams to identify where projects may support, enable, or complement one another. As portfolios grow in size and complexity, potentially valuable connections can therefore remain difficult to see.
However, artificial intelligence is opening new possibilities for identifying those connections. By processing large volumes of operational information, AI tools can detect patterns and relationships that may be difficult to identify manually, helping teams explore where coordination across projects, sectors, or institutions could add value.
One emerging approach is agentic AI: artificial intelligence designed to pursue a specific goal with limited supervision. Unlike conventional AI models that mainly respond to individual prompts, agentic systems can carry out a sequence of tasks, adapt as they proceed, and combine the work of specialized agents.
From Individual Operations to a Connected Portfolio
In Belize, this approach is being tested through a tool that analyzes documentation from IDB and IDB Invest operations to identify potential relationships across the portfolio and pipeline. It looks at variables including objectives, beneficiaries, and interventions to flag where one operation may support another.
The result is an interactive network that allows teams to explore the portfolio as a connected system rather than as a list of individual operations. Each suggested relationship remains reviewable: the tool indicates the strength of the connection, the areas of overlap, the supporting evidence, and the mechanism through which the operations could potentially reinforce one another.
The tool does not determine that a synergy exists or replace operational judgment. Instead, it narrows the search, highlighting plausible connections and giving teams a clearer starting point for deciding which opportunities merit further discussion.
The idea emerged from a portfolio-focused discussion during the development of the country strategy and was shared at the Belize Country Office retreat in March 2026, which brought together team leaders, sector consultants, and operations staff from across the IDB Group. The question behind the exercise was straightforward: how could the impact of individual operations be strengthened by looking more systematically at the connections among them?
How the Agentic AI Tool Works
The workflow is designed to move from project documents to potential operational connections in a series of steps.
First, one agent extracts structured information from project documents, including operation codes, sectors, objectives, beneficiaries, geographic focus, implementing entities, components, and interventions.
A second agent turns that information into concise project profiles. The system then compares operations in pairs to assess whether one could support, enable, or complement another. For each potential relationship, it records the strength of the connection, the areas of overlap, the supporting evidence, and the mechanism through which the operations may be linked.
A final agent converts the relationships selected for review into a network visualization. Each operation appears as a node, while the links between them represent potential synergies the system identifies.
This structure allows the AI to read across large volumes of unstructured documentation while keeping each suggested relationship transparent and open to review by operational teams.
Where Synergies Begin to Emerge
The analysis covers 18 operations across Belize’s portfolio and pipeline and identifies 101 potential directional relationships for further review. The value of the exercise lies less in the number of links than in what they reveal about where connections appear to cluster.
One finding stands out: the operation focused on labor markets emerges as the strongest connector across the portfolio, with links to several areas that might otherwise be managed separately.
In practical terms, this opens potential connections with education on skills and training; private sector and firm financing operations on productivity and employment; agriculture and the blue economy on livelihoods and value chains; and social, urban, and service delivery operations on inclusion.
Other potential points of connection also emerge around firm financing, the blue economy, education, agriculture, water, urban development, trade, and digital innovation. These links can help teams identify shared beneficiaries, common institutions, complementary implementation pathways, or areas where closer coordination across the IDB Group may be worth exploring.
At the same time, the network is selective. It does not assume that every operation should connect with every other one. Instead, it helps narrow the field to relationships that appear sufficiently plausible to merit validation by the teams that know the operational context best.
From Data to Dialogue
The tool’s most important output is not the network itself, but the conversations it can trigger. By showing the portfolio as a system of relationships, it helps teams identify where coordination between public and private-sector operations may be worth exploring.
Users can review the reasoning behind each suggested link and assess whether a potential connection is feasible, timely, and relevant in practice. The AI narrows the field, but operational knowledge remains essential to validate, discard, or pursue the opportunities it identifies.
The broader lesson from the Belize experience is that stronger development impact may depend not only on the quality of individual operations, but also on how well their potential connections are understood and used, recognizing that development does not happen in silos.