As companies face an increasingly complex and risky cross-border trade environment, they cannot afford to become complacent when it comes to continuously optimizing their compliance program, especially with enforcement activity in full swing and non-compliance penalties becoming heftier and more commonplace. 

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Consider that $1.73B worth of goods were seized under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) in 2024, while agencies like the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of State (DOS), and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) continue to crack down on sanctions and export control violations, including a $216M penalty — the statutory maximum — in June 2025 against a San Francisco venture capital firm for violating Russia-related sanctions.

With the prospect of severe financial and reputational damage, global trade management today is more challenging than ever. Geopolitical volatility, expanding compliance requirements, and dynamic tariffs and trade barriers are forcing supply chain and logistics leaders to prioritize their global trade intelligence processes, tools, and technologies. 

But the focus on global trade intelligence is not only about ensuring robust screening to avoid the costly misstep of non-compliance. It’s also about accessing in-depth trade data to inform intelligent decision-making, whether streamlining duty and tariff determination, sourcing alternate suppliers, or uncovering new market opportunities. 

AI transforming the global trade intelligence landscape 

For organizations grappling with cross-border commerce challenges, automated global trade intelligence solutions are integral to building more agile, intelligent, and resilient supply chain networks. And artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a growing role in helping organizations to keep pace with frequent and complex tariff and regulatory changes, secure better supply sources, and leverage high-quality competitive intelligence to drive growth.

AI-enabled screening. False positives are screening alerts that appear to match restricted, sanctioned and denied party entities but are, in fact, benign—leading to unnecessary reviews, wasted time and delayed shipments for import or export. With the frequency of regulatory updates and the substantial volume of information that flows through international commerce, conducting effective screening without overloading resources with false positives is essential. 

AI-driven screening for restricted, sanctioned, and denied parties leverages advanced machine learning and natural language processing to significantly reduce false positives. Even with large screening volumes, the combination of automation in collaboration with human oversight has helped reduce false positives to just fractions of a percent, minimizing the effort required to review and clear false positives.

By accelerating the review and adjudication of screening results with intelligent filtering, flexible control, and human-centered quality assurance, AI-powered solutions eliminate unnecessary reviews, increase compliance productivity, and enhance compliance levels while mitigating the risk of costly violations.

AI-driven product classification. Underpinned by vast data repositories of the World Trade Organization and country-specific interpretations of the data, import/export classification is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. Companies need a comprehensive, detailed description of goods: What is the product? Of what is it made? Where is it from? How is it packaged? What is the duty rate? 

Given today’s dynamic regulatory environment, supply chain leaders also need to understand the potentially additive impact of rapidly evolving tariffs stacked on top of each other. These granular requirements, in conjunction with the nuance and judgement inherent in the classification process, are heightening the incentive for organizations to revisit Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) classification decisions — and leverage AI-assisted HTS product classification and duty determination solutions — to help uncover opportunities for savings. 

Because large language models (LLMs) and generative AI consider the contextual relationship between the totality of the product descriptions and the totality of the regulations, AI-enabled classification tools can quickly determine the optimal classification for trade professionals to evaluate.

Today, AI-assisted HTS product classification and duty determination solutions are transforming the classification workflow, accelerating product lookup capabilities in combination with other features, such as regulations cross-referencing and landed cost calculations. These innovations help companies manage high-volume repetitive tasks without overloading existing compliance resources or adding new staff.

Optimized query building with AI-based agents. Unlike generative AI which analyzes data to produce an output (e.g., written content, images, audio), agentic AI mimics human decision-making to solve complex problems with minimal human intervention. It has the ability to understand context, set goals, and adjust actions based on environmental feedback. 

In the context of global trade intelligence, agentic AI accelerates and simplifies complex trade queries. Compliance teams can converse with AI-based agents to answer common questions and quickly identify historical trade patterns, emerging trends, or specific data needs (e.g., on commodities, companies, and products) to save time and effort and drive business growth. With agentic AI, users can define searches more precisely, ensuring they extract the most relevant trade data and insights to make faster, smarter decisions. 

Plus, by enabling users to mine data using natural language queries, trade data content becomes more accessible and actionable, while minimizing the training time required to build proficiency in developing optimal queries. In addition, the conversational process of asking questions to an AI-based tool removes the barrier of the user interface, creating a much more natural and effective interaction for a business user who is trying to achieve a specific outcome. 

ROI of ai in global trade intelligence

As the repository of global trade data and government regulations expands and tariffs and trade deals continue to evolve, leveraging AI across global trade intelligence practices is critical to help maintain competitiveness in a constantly shifting market. AI-enabled global trade intelligence capabilities help companies:

1. Curtail costs to shore up margins.

AI-driven capabilities help companies automate import/export processes to increase compliance accuracy and efficiency, reduce direct labor costs, and scale beyond the ability to put a new human in a seat. Organizations can determine more favorable classifications to generate savings on import costs, uncover sourcing alternatives to boost supplier diversity and mitigate financial exposure, and better understand legal and financial trade risks to choose the supply chain paths that maximize profit, cost savings, and resiliency.

2. Identify strategic opportunities.

Using AI-led tools with natural language processing to enhance query building, companies can optimize trade lanes, discover alternative buyers and suppliers, and uncover competitive intelligence, such as untapped markets or competitors’ import and export transactions. AI-powered predictive analytics can help forecast future demand or potential supply chain disruptions, enabling companies to make adjustments to pricing schemes, sourcing relationships, and inventory levels or create backup plans to minimize disruption to the flow of goods.

3. Mitigate compliance risk.

In the face of geopolitical upheaval, volatile tariffs, and ever-changing global trade regulations, supply chain and logistics leaders need to protect their business. AI-enabled solutions help companies automate and simplify denied party screening — including reducing time-consuming false positives — to stay compliant with evolving international regulations, minimize exposure to risk, and address threats before they impact the business.

Moving forward, improvements in natural language models will continue to make AI-driven global trade intelligence solutions easier for trade professionals to do their jobs, whether that’s screening potential suppliers, looking up HTS codes to determine duty, or analyzing trade trends to benchmark the company’s performance. They’ll also help resources scale their ability to positively impact business results. When implemented with a human in the loop, AI-powered capabilities help organizations to navigate the complexity of global trade compliance with greater confidence, speed, and accuracy.