In essence, both in trade compliance and in logistics, digitalisation is providing and processing automatically the right data in the right way at the right time to facilitate the physical movement of goods. But, depending on the process, the tools and technologies can be vastly different. Visibility of where the goods are and prescriptive analytics that propose or even automatically execute the most appropriate action based on intelligence derived from the data, is most relevant in optimising logistics. The physical activity of loading, moving, and unloading goods will always remain, but the efficiency in the chain, ensuring the right resources are available at exactly the right time to execute these physical processes, can greatly benefit from these digital tools and processes. This eliminates or reduces waiting times and deploys resources in the most efficient and, hence, most economical and ecological way. The most advanced tools in this space will combine location data with AI, augmented by risk assessment of external events, and decision engines to drive the proper processes.

In Trade Compliance, the tools need to be able to assess the legality of a transaction before it takes place and prevent the transaction if it is in breach of legislation. This requires an exact view of current legislation and mapping of the Supply Chain. Most of these tools will need to be deterministic in nature, as there are no real grey zones in international trade legislation. The only space that is more heuristic in nature and may benefit from AI would be matching partners in the Supply Chain with lists of prohibited parties to ensure blocking and releasing the right transactions. This requires a measure of risk analysis to filter out those parties where a full investigation is needed. This investigation will require human intervention to ensure the right parties are excluded from the trade or, inversely, the right blocked orders are released.