Turning Cargo Data Into Five Second Decisions With CargoSeer

Neil C. Hughes (0:00)

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What happens when a Customs Officer must assess thousands of containers, dozens of documents, multiple languages, and several kinds of risks, all without slowing legitimate trade? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to be speaking with the founder of CargoSeer and Head of Customs AI at bigbear.ai. And we're going to be talking about using artificial intelligence to support human judgment at the border.

He will explain today how AI can combine documentation, routes, images, commodity codes and historical patterns before presenting an operator with the information that they need to make that final call. And we'll also discuss CargoSeer's reported reduction in decision time from several minutes to under five seconds. And the very different costs around positives and negatives and why local testing matters. We'll cover that today. And also David's James Bond style command center analogy, which is particularly memorable. But his message is refreshingly practical. Technology earns trust by helping experienced people do their jobs better. With that scene set, let me officially introduce you to him now.

So thank you for joining me on the podcast today, David. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

David Smason (2:00)

Yeah, excellent. Thank you so much for having me now. It's a real pleasure to be here. But we have introduction. My name is David, as you've already mentioned. I founded a company called CargoSeer just under four years ago. Our company was acquired by Big Bear AI.

At the beginning of this year in January, Big Bear AI is a specialized defense tech company.

Providing really cutting-edge artificial intelligence solutions to governments worldwide. And we were acquired, as I said, at the beginning of this year to start bolstering or to continue enhancing more accurately the Customs and Borders portfolio that Big Bear is really going hard on.

Big Bear has a real deep bench of Customs, Border Enforcement experts. Starting from the top, Mr. Kevin McAleenan, who served in multiple very, very high level positions within the US government, including being in charge of CBP. He was acting secretary of DHS during the first Trump administration and so on and so forth. All the way down to operators who have been at the sharp edge for the better part of the last 30 years. And that's where it really gets interesting.

Because CargoSeer was founded in my personal kind of mission or North Star, if you would, is to really build something for operators that operators like, feel confident in, and can really use and have the biggest impact in the field. So we built CargoSeer. We did a great job with the technology. And then we got acquired by Big Bear. And now I'm heading up Customs AI at Big Bear. And again, it's really a pleasure to be here with you. And I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Neil C. Hughes (3:41)

The pleasure is mine, my friend, because every day on this podcast, I try and get people thinking differently about the way that technology impacts our lives, our work and indeed entire world. And also get people thinking differently about technology in industries you don't associate with tech. And customs agencies, for example, they're challenged with moving enormous volumes of cargo while also identifying, smuggling and trafficking and so much more. So why is that balance so difficult with let's say the traditional processes?

David Smason (4:15)

That's a really good question. I mean, anytime you have really complex processes with hundreds of thousands of moving parts by nature, it's going to get difficult to find a balance.

Traditionally, customs was one of those industries that was all paper-based. Literally people running around with clipboards, imports, trying to find the container that they're supposed to be looking at. I mean, if you can imagine up until 10 years ago, that's really how it was. And it is still that way in some parts of the world. You have a container ship docks, thousands of containers come off. Customs is tasked with looking at each and every one of those containers to identify many, many different threats, right? It can start from national security. Are there drugs in that container? All the way down to revenue collection. Have the right taxes been paid on the goods in the container? And they have 50, 60, 70 different documents. Some of them are sometimes even in different languages, not to get started on the handwriting, right?