WiseTech Global CEO Sees 50% Labor Force Reduction Brought About By AI Tools
The development of artificial intelligence tools specifically aimed at facilitating trade and improving import and export compliance could potentially halve the global workforce dealing with these matters, said the head of WiseTech Global during the company's Global Investor Day on Dec. 3.
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More than 50% of labor in logistics service providers might be removed through the use of AI agents, with most of that labor located in shared service centers or business processing outsource centers in countries with lower labor costs, said WiseTech CEP Zubin Appoo. However, the highly skilled logistics service provider operators that are local to operations and to the import and export supply chain will remain, he continued.
"Their roles become even more important. Their roles are to verify and to partner with the AI agents to make sure that we're delivering or that they're delivering high-quality outputs," Appoo said.
The bulk of the investor session on AI entailed executives providing updates on what AI tools the company has been developing for international trade.
WiseTech has been developing argentic AI tools for workflows, including an import customs workflow, Mirta Funtes Dos Santos, WiseTech team leader for artificial intelligence, told company investors. Agentic AI is a type of artificial intelligence system that uses generative AI to focus on a limited subject or field, with the idea that it can operate within those predefined constraints, according to a definition from IBM.
This is in addition to AI-informed classification assistant developed by WiseTech that does the bulk of classifying and leaves the customs broker to ensure that the code that was assigned is correct, she said.
This type of classification work is "very ripe for AI picking" because of the amount of interpretation that may be involved, along with all the legal notes and descriptions affiliated with the product, she said.
Andrew Cummings, CargoWise senior project manager, said CargoWise has been developing software that uses AI technology as it grabs data from thousands of documents, such as cargo invoices or accounts payable.
There are so many documents that aren’t digitized in international trade, such as PDFs or images of a printout or scans of an image, Cummings said. While data entry for these items may be relatively short, global freight forwarders may encounter millions upon millions of these documents each year.
The AI enables the software to understand the documents that it is reviewing, and if the model picks up that there’s uncertainty about the data, it will be flagged for human review, he continued.