Australia's biggest listed tech company expects artificial intelligence to eliminate half of all logistics jobs, while making the other half more significant.
Wisetech Global has built a number of AI agents into its Cargowise platform that is used by more than 17,000 freight forwarders and third-party logistics providers to manage shipments around the world.
"We have a very strong view that over the next couple of years, as we release more and more AI agents to the industry, we will have a significant impact on labour in logistics providers," chief executive Zubin Appoo told an investor summit on Wednesday.
Specifically, Wisetech believes AI agents can remove more than 50 per cent of the labour in the logistic provider business.
"To be very clear, that is the labour that is very likely in a shared service centre or BPO, or business processing outsource centre in an offshore, lower labour-cost country," Mr Appoo said.
The use of AI will make highly skilled logistics service provider operators that are local to the operations and local to the supply chain even more important, he said.
"Their roles are to verify and partner with the AI agents to make sure that we're delivering, or that they're delivering high quality outputs.
"This is a real game changer in terms of the profitability, the margin and the performance of our customers, our freight forwarders and customs brokers."
Mr Appoo explained that documents are the lifeblood of international trade, and many are not digitised.
Most are PDFs or images of printouts, which a freight forwarder then has to enter into the CargoWise platform.
That only takes about five minutes but a global freight forwarder might have to deal with 10 million commercial invoices a year, he said.
"That's 95 years of data entry, every single year, just on commercial invoices," he said. "So that's a pretty huge burden."
Customers are aware of this and use offshore data processing or optical character recognition solutions, but CargoWise now offers a bolt-on document ingestion system that relies on large language models, Mr Appo said.
"The latest AI models, in a sense, are able to understand what they're looking at on a page," he said.
"They're not just translating text. This make enables them to make human-like decisions about how to structure the information and what to do with it."
If there's any uncertainty about the data, the AI agent will flag that for a human operator, he said.
It will also detect red flags on shipments around compliance issues, such as if a party on the shipment is subject to sanctions or the product might have prohibited uses, he said.
Wisetech's new classification assistant also does 90 per cent of the time consuming and laborious tasks for customs brokers, said Mirta Fagundes dos Santos, WiseTech's AI team leader.
"Classifying goods is not as simple as it sounds," she said.
For example, a ceramic pepper grinder shouldn't be listed under "ceramic tableware or kitchenware," but as a handheld mechanical device under 10kg used in the preparation of food, she explained.
"So it's very, very ripe for AI picking, because there's a lot of interpretation of what is this good, reading all the legal notes and deciding where does it actually go."
And if a good is incorrectly classified by a customs broker, they face fines and reputational risk, and there are trade policy and potential national security implications, she added.
By using custom-made AI narrowly designed for specific tasks, the agents do not hallucinate and are extremely accurate, executives said.
