Its April of 2025, and the hottest topic in supply chain is duties & tariffs.

As companies rush to analyze the impact of the tariffs, we have been exploring how technology can help perform related analysis faster & more accurately, automating much of the workflow.

A recent WSJ headline

During the initial wave of tariffs in 2018, I was working as a logistics manager, and I spent many an hour on hts.usitc.gov, rulings.cbp.gov, and federalregister.gov, not to mention combing through the documents of every inbound shipment to confirm the HTS codes were correct.

Today, we are able to automate much of this work, leveraging API services and our own custom HTS code classification agent, woven together as an automated end-to-end duty rate calculation system. You can check out the demo here:

Demo video showing automated HTS code classification & duty rate calculation

The remainder of this article provides a deeper dive, and in the Resources section we provide a comprehensive list of solutions available in the market today.

Full Autopilot?

First things first, are we really talking about fully automated HTS code classification and duty rate calculation? Because my first reaction would be: “No way are we putting something this critical and nuanced on autopilot”.

“No way are we putting something this critical and nuanced on autopilot.”

This is probably a good instinct, and if you watch our demo, you will see that while we could go full autopilot, our setup is aimed more at assisting a human. That said, there are some tasks, for example double checking shipping docs, that should go full autopilot. Others can likely get there as you build usage data (with a human in the loop for exceptions), especially if tariff rates aren’t changing daily.

How New Tech Is Adding Value

If we aren’t going full autopilot, what is the value proposition?

Speeding up your work - tools are available to get you all the relevant data you need for your analysis, at your fingertips, removing much of the grunt work.
Improving your accuracy - a key feature of the system in our demo is that it provides several potential HTS code options (and could provide more if we configure it that way), providing an outside perspective that might catch something you didn’t. The same goes for duty rate calculation.

Finally, all of this lays the groundwork to move towards full autopilot as mentioned above.

Now let’s quickly talk use cases.

Use cases