As companies face a complex and high-risk cross-border business environment, they cannot be complacent when it comes to constantly optimizing their compliance programs, especially as enforcement activities are in full swing and penalties for non-compliance are becoming heavier and more common.
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Consider it 1.73 billion dollars The goods were seized under the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) in 2024, while agencies such as the US 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 law. 216 million dollars Penalty – maximum statutory – in June 2025 against a San Francisco venture capital firm for Russia-related sanctions violations.
With the prospect of severe financial and credit damage, managing global business 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 business processes, tools, and IT.
But focusing on global trade information is not just about ensuring strong screening to avoid the costly mistake of non-compliance. It’s also access to deep business data to inform smart decision-making, whether it’s simplifying tasking and tariffs, sourcing alternative sources, or discovering new market opportunities.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the intelligent landscape of global business
For organizations grappling with the challenges of cross-border trade, intelligent, automated global trade solutions are essential to creating more agile, intelligent and resilient supply chain networks. And artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasing role in helping organizations keep pace with frequent and complex changes in tariffs and regulations, secure better supply sources, and use high-quality competitive intelligence to drive growth.
Screening with artificial intelligence False positives are screening alerts that appear to match restricted, sanctioned, and denied party entities, but are, in fact, benign—resulting in unnecessary checks, wasted time, and delayed shipments for imports or exports. With the frequency of regulatory updates and the significant volume of information flowing through international trade, it is imperative to perform effective screening without overloading resources with false positives.
AI-based screening for restricted, sanctioned and restricted parties uses advanced machine learning and natural language processing to significantly reduce false positives. Even with the large volume of screening, combining automation with human oversight has helped reduce false positives to just a fraction of a percent, minimizing the effort required to review and remove false positives.
By accelerating the review and adjudication of screening results with intelligent filtering, flexible control, and human-centric quality assurance, AI-based solutions eliminate unnecessary reviews, increase compliance productivity, and increase compliance levels while reducing the risk of costly violations.
Classification of products based on artificial intelligence. Classification of imports/exports is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process with the support of vast WTO data repositories and country-specific interpretations of the data. Companies need a comprehensive and detailed product description: What is the product? What is it made of? where is it from How is it packaged? What is the duty rate?
Given today’s dynamic regulatory environment, supply chain leaders must also understand the potential cumulative impact of rapidly evolving tariffs stacked on top of each other. These minor requirements, coupled with the nuances and judgment inherent in the classification process, increase the incentive for organizations to revisit Harmonized Tariff Program (HTS) classification decisions—and use HTS product classification and tasking solutions—to help uncover opportunities for savings.
Because large-scale language models (LLM) and generative AI consider the contextual relationship between the totality of product descriptions and the totality of regulations, AI-based classification tools can quickly determine the optimal classification for professionals to evaluate.
Today, HTS product classification and AI-assisted tasking solutions are transforming classification workflows, accelerating product search capabilities in combination with other features, such as regulatory cross-referencing and land cost calculations. These innovations help companies manage high-volume repetitive tasks without overloading existing resources or adding new employees.
Constructing optimized queries with AI-based agents. Unlike generative AI, which analyzes data to produce output (eg, written content, images, audio), agentic AI mimics human decision-making to solve complex problems with minimal human intervention. It has the ability to understand the context, set goals and adjust actions based on environmental feedback.
In the field of global business intelligence, artificial intelligence accelerates and simplifies complex business queries. Compliance teams can talk to AI-powered agents to answer common questions and quickly identify historical business patterns, emerging trends, or specific data needs (e.g., about commodities, companies, and products) to save time and effort and drive business growth. With agentive AI, users can refine searches and ensure they extract the most relevant data and business insights for faster, smarter decision making.
Additionally, by enabling users to mine data using natural language queries, business data content becomes more accessible and actionable, while minimizing the training time required to develop skills in developing optimal queries. Additionally, the conversational process of asking questions of an AI-powered tool removes the user interface barrier, creating a much more natural and effective interaction for the business user trying to achieve a specific outcome.
AI return on investment in global business intelligence
As the global trade data repository and government regulations expand, tariffs and trade transactions continue to evolve. The use of artificial intelligence in global business intelligence practices is critical to help remain competitive in an ever-changing marketplace. Global AI-enabled business intelligence capabilities help companies:
1. Cost reduction to strengthen margins.
AI-powered capabilities help companies automate import/export processes to increase compliance accuracy and efficiency, reduce direct labor costs, and go beyond the ability to put a new human in the chair. Organizations can determine more favorable classifications to save import costs, explore alternatives to increase supplier diversity and reduce financial exposure, and better understand legal and financial business risks to choose supply chain routes that maximize profits, cost savings, and flexibility.
2. Identification of strategic opportunities.
Using artificial intelligence-based tools with natural language processing to improve query construction, companies can optimize business lines, discover alternative buyers and suppliers, and uncover competitive information, such as untapped markets or competitors’ import and export transactions. AI-powered predictive analytics can help predict future demand or potential supply chain disruptions, enabling companies to make changes to pricing plans, sourcing relationships and inventory levels, or create back-up plans to minimize disruption to the flow of goods.
3. Reduce compliance risk.
In the face of geopolitical developments, volatile tariffs and changing global trade regulations, supply chain and logistics leaders must protect their business. AI-powered solutions help companies automate and simplify reject screening—including reducing false positives—to stay compliant with evolving international regulations, minimize risk exposure, and address threats before they impact business.
Moving forward, improvements in natural language models will continue to make AI-powered global business intelligence solutions easier for business professionals, whether it’s screening potential suppliers, looking up HTS codes for assignment, or analyzing business trends to assess company performance. They also help resources scale their ability to positively impact business outcomes. AI-powered capabilities help organizations navigate the complexities of global trade compliance with greater confidence, speed, and accuracy.
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