UPS has moved agentic artificial intelligence from pilot project to core customs infrastructure, automating the vast majority of its daily US import clearances as trade rules have become more demanding.
According to the company, the end of the de minimis exemption for low-value shipments sharply increased the paperwork burden at the border. Carol Tomé, UPS chief executive, said on the company’s third-quarter 2025 earnings call that daily customs entries rose tenfold after th...
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e change, with the carrier facing far more packages requiring formal clearance.
The scale of that shift is striking. In March 2025, UPS was processing about 13,000 dutiable packages a day and clearing roughly 21% without manual intervention, Supply Chain Dive reported. By September, daily volume had climbed to 112,000 packages, and 90% were being cleared without a human stepping in. That means the share handled automatically rose from one in five to nine in ten in just a few months, even as the workload increased dramatically.
UPS says the improvement comes from agentic AI, which can carry out a sequence of tasks rather than simply answering a single prompt. On the earnings call, Ms Tomé said the company had upgraded its shipping systems to meet expanded data requirements from US Customs and Border Protection, then embedded agentic AI to streamline formal entry processing. In practice, the software now handles classification, documentation and error checking as one continuous workflow.
The result, UPS said in a June announcement, is that 97% of shipments now clear customs on their first day of entry. The company credits that performance to automated product classification, digital trade documentation and more predictable landed costs at checkout.
UPS is also applying the same approach to wider network planning. According to the company, it is building a real-time digital twin of its logistics operation, linking facilities, transport modes and package flows in a virtual model that updates every 10 minutes. UPS says that analyses which once took engineering teams months can now be completed in an afternoon, while forecast accuracy has improved by as much as 40%.
That broader push reflects how logistics companies are using AI not just as a support tool but as an operational layer. In many enterprise settings, AI still assists human workers with routine checks, leaving ambiguous cases for people to resolve. UPS appears to be pushing further, letting software manage most of the customs workflow itself and reserving staff intervention for the roughly 10% of cases the system cannot settle alone.
The company’s automation drive extends beyond customs. UPS has expanded RFID tracking across its US delivery network, including sensors in vehicles and facilities and tags for shipments from more than 5,500 UPS Store locations, The Next Web reported. It said package misloads have fallen nearly 70% since the rollout began three years ago. Combined with AI, that data gives the carrier a much clearer, near-real-time picture of where individual packages are and how the network is performing.
UPS is also training staff to work alongside these tools, underscoring that the transformation is as much about process redesign as it is about software. For now, though, the clearest measure of success is the customs operation itself: a workload that once depended heavily on human review is now being handled automatically at industrial scale.
Source: Noah Wire Services
