Customs Compliance is Entering the AI Era: TPM Today hosts Hugo Pakula

CBP is putting AI and $3.5B in enforcement funding behind fraud detection, and this episode of TPM Today gets into what that means for compliance teams. Eric Johnson hosted Hugo Pakula, CEO of Tru Identity, for a conversation on how customs enforcement is shifting from broad checks to targeted, data-driven scrutiny. The takeaway: importers who can't show their work, meaning trace and defend how a product was made, classified, and sourced, are the ones who will get caught by the new tools.

CBP has real budget now. Congress granted $3.5B for AI and machine learning enforcement, funding pattern recognition and anomaly detection that CBP has wanted since at least 2017 but never had the money to build.

Enforcement is being treated as a national security issue. Pakula compared the current posture to the post-9/11 period: stops are up sharply, and the framing has moved from routine penalty to monetary and reputational risk with national security weight.

Data is the differentiator, not tariffs. The conversation kept returning to one point: businesses that can produce clean, traceable data get better treatment from CBP, faster clearance, and fewer disruptions than those relying on manual or incomplete records.

Partnership with CBP is a competitive advantage. Pakula referenced a Bloomberg story on Tru's work with CBP, arguing that companies who make their compliance data available to CBP proactively build trust that pays off across their whole supply chain.

The compliance bar isn't going back down. Whether or not the current administration changes, the panel argued that CBP's shift to AI-driven, data-first enforcement is permanent, and multi-tier supply chain visibility (knowing exactly how and where goods are made) is now table stakes.