The White House wants America to win the global race in artificial intelligence. Trade data — the source code of the global economy — is an ideal place to start.
What you’ll learn in this article:
- How the plans to improve productivity throughout the economy and change the way government operates.
- Why global trade data is the kind of large dataset that’s ideal for AI innovation.
- How ImportGenius is combining AI with trade data to create new and better business insight — and deliver it faster than ever.
- Why law enforcement stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI-driven innovation.
🎯 Best for: Business founders and leaders, CTOs, CIOs, and other C-suite executives managing supplier and government relationships
“The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence.” So reads the very first sentence of last month’s White House AI Action Plan. “The United States needs to innovate faster and more comprehensively than our competitors in the development and distribution of new AI technology across every field.” The AI Action Plan is replete with policy changes and incentives for businesses to develop, adopt and implement AI innovations — and it demands the same of government agencies.
Many business leaders, however, remain skeptical about the benefits of AI. A recent article in the New York Times pointed out that companies have yet to see any productivity gains from the billions they’ve already invested in the technology.
But in the broader picture, says ImportGenius Chief Technology Officer James Orr, “the idea that government should be pushing to adopt new AI technologies is really important,” adding that the productivity gains from AI are certain to grow with time. “The fact is that, even if we froze the development of artificial intelligence itself right now, it would take us at least a decade just to figure out all the ways we can apply what we’ve already built.”
Orr’s job is to figure out those AI applications for global trade data. One of the clear advantages of AI technology is its ability to parse and analyze the massive troves of raw information that are the foundation of the “big data” economy, a task it can perform exponentially faster than humans. And trade data is the perfect example, since it’s made up of information from thousands of shipping manifests and bills of lading. Piece-by-piece it’s just cargo inventories, but taken together it’s what some have called “the source code of the global economy.” And ImportGenius, spurred by the AI Action Plan, is building AI tools that will allow anyone to unlock its secrets.
Why Trade Data is Ideal for AI Applications
The Challenge: Taking a database made up of billions of entries and making it easier to navigate.
The Solution: Developing AI-driven applications that allow users to parse the data and extract business insight in a matter of seconds.
The 12 largest US seaports load and unload more than 65,000 TEUs, or standardized shipping containers, every single day. The US Customs and Border Protection service gathers information on each one — including ports of origin and destination, importers and exporters, shipping lines, HS codes, product specifications, quantities, volume and weight — and updates it daily. The result is one of the most valuable data troves in the world, and one of the most opaque as well.
“The world of freight and logistics and shipping is an extremely complicated system, and no single actor has a full view of it,” says Orr. “But it’s all contained in a database with billions of rows of data, and if you know how to read it, you can paint a picture of the movement of goods all over the world.”
The ImportGenius database allows users to search for just about anything, enabling companies to manage their supply chains more efficiently, keep tabs on competitors, and identify new suppliers and customers. Earlier this year, ImportGenius unveiled its AI-powered Company Profiler so that users can quickly obtain detailed information on any individual importer or exporter, including financial data, products and services, competitive position, and contact information — all in seconds.
And the Company Profiler is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of AI, which uses the power of artificial intelligence to zoom in on the thing you’re looking for once you’ve found it — but you still have to find it. Orr is currently working to make AI part of the very first step in the search process, so that users can converse with ImportGenius the same way they do with applications like ChatGPT, using plain English.
As Orr describes it: “A user with no data expertise can ask about a specific export from a specific country, and the system will know which datasets to use, which fields to search, and the extra techniques and gotchas that are typically only known to our research staff.” Orr’s plan-making AI agent will run searches, display raw results and summarized insights, and even teach users how it did all that.
Uncovering Trade Data’s Secrets
The Challenge: Cracking down on global instances of forced labour, sanctions evasion, laundering, human trafficking and more.
The Solution: Developing AI systems to assist investigators with the work of data search and analysis.
Beyond its use as a form of business intelligence, trade data is also an essential resource for any organization seeking to expose nefarious or illegal activity, be they investigative journalists or law enforcement officials. In recent years, ImportGenius’s research team has assisted in investigations that have uncovered the use of forced labour in hair products from China, planeloads of cash shipped from Russia to Venezuela, sanctioned Russian airlines receiving American-made goods, and the laundering of illegal gold into the global supply chain.
Each of those investigations involved weeks of work by ImportGenius’ expert researchers, who parsed the data for suspect shipments and cross-referenced them against other databases or available public information to verify their findings.
Orr envisions the use of AI-driven systems to assist in those kinds of processes, so that the gumshoe-detective work of rooting out the bad guys can be done in a matter of hours rather than days. “Using AI for this particular stage of investigation can drastically improve the efficiency of law enforcement, freeing up more agents to pursue more cases and resolve them faster.”
Transforming the Trade Data Business
The Challenge: Enabling ImportGenius, as a service its clients rely upon, to keep up with the rapid pace of advancement in artificial intelligence.
The Solution: Rebuilding the technology foundation of our business so that AI-driven innovation can be incorporated at every step.
Ultimately, says Orr, ImportGenius is already transforming its business systems and processes to enable the use of AI. “We’re rebuilding the foundations of our business, so that we can incorporate AI, machine learning and large language models into every aspect of our operations,” Orr explains. “AI continues to advance, and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time a new breakthrough is reached. That means rebuilding our software architecture, our deployment, evaluation and monitoring processes, all of it.” It’s a pathway that any digital service will have to follow to stay at the cutting edge.
“It’s all completely new stuff. We are taking ImportGenius to the frontiers of technology, and we’re convinced that it will provide immense user value and differentiate us from our competitors.”
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