Flexport

For U.S. customs brokers and importers, 2025 marked an unprecedented compliance stress test. Tariff policy changed with extraordinary frequency throughout the year, making it nearly impossible for customs teams to keep filings current through manual processes. The customs industry formally declared 2026 the 'Year of the Audit,' acknowledging that filing errors had reached an all-time high while government enforcement activity was simultaneously intensifying. At stake were not only potential penalties and supply chain delays, but also the inverse problem: companies were systematically overpaying tariffs with no mechanism to identify or recover those funds. In a sector where a single misclassified entry can trigger audits and downstream disruptions, the cost of inaccuracy had become unsustainable at scale.

Flexport developed the 'Audit Your Customs Broker' AI agent, powered by large language models and generative AI, to conduct automated compliance audits across a company's complete history of customs entries — identifying misclassifications, errors, and compliance gaps at scale without manual review. Following an internal-first deployment model, Flexport ran the agent against its own filing history to establish a verified performance baseline before any customer rollout. Once confirmed, the tool was made available free of charge to any importer wanting to audit their existing broker's work — turning a compliance capability into a market-transparency move. Alongside the auditor, Flexport built a tariff refund calculator, initially launched in January 2026 to estimate potential IEEPA refund exposure ahead of litigation. Following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against IEEPA tariffs, the calculator was updated to actively prepare and process refund claims, extending the platform from error detection to direct cost recovery.

Flexport reduced its own U.S. customs filing error rate to 0.2%, a figure CEO Ryan Petersen estimates represents a 10X improvement over any other customs broker in the market — establishing a new industry benchmark at a time when average broker error rates remain materially higher.

Key outcomes:

• 0.2% filing error rate achieved on Flexport's own entries following internal AI agent deployment
• 10X improvement over estimated competitor error rates, per Flexport's market assessment
• Full historical audit coverage across all past entries, enabling rapid identification of errors and immediate correction filing
• Refund calculator updated post-Supreme Court ruling to prepare IEEPA refund claims, converting the compliance workflow into an active cost-recovery mechanism for customers

• Piloting AI compliance tools on internal operations before customer rollout provides benchmark data and validates accuracy claims with credibility that self-reported metrics cannot.
• In high-volatility regulatory environments, manual compliance processes cannot keep pace with policy change cycles measured in weeks — automation becomes a structural requirement, not an efficiency gain.
• AI audit agents should target full historical entry libraries, not just forward-looking filings — past errors represent both unresolved liability and recoverable overpayment.
• Linking error detection directly to financial recovery transforms compliance from a cost center into a measurable revenue-recovery function, strengthening the business case for AI investment.