How Trump's tariffs made AI a lifeline for businesses. The aggressive trade policies pursued by Donald Trump increased the costs of importing goods and complicated trade rules, making them unpredictable.
Companies worldwide had no choice but to quickly change how they managed supply chains, pricing strategies, and selection of global partners.
Companies relying on factories overseas had to pass new costs onto customers, look for new suppliers in other countries, or find a way to navigate a confusing and constantly changing tariff system, making every shipment more expensive and harder to track.
Many companies realized that their legacy systems were not fast or smart enough to handle all the changes as tariff laws can now change overnight, exposing their operations to unpredictable risks.
AI has become a lifeline for companies to understand their supply chains, reduce their exposure to tariffs, and find new ways to cut costs.
Trump started a trade war, and companies turned to AI. The Trump administration imposed tariffs that made global trade more tense and unpredictable for companies that had spent decades building international supply chains.
The tariffs imposed by Trump affected electric vehicles and batteries, while other tariffs targeted raw materials, machinery, consumer electronics, and simple goods like textiles and furniture.
Since the U.S. customs system has over 20,000 product categories, each may face a different rate or rule depending on the country of origin and trade status. This ambiguity forced companies to go back and analyze thousands of product categories, track long harmonized tariff codes, and identify which parts of their inventory are now affected.
Companies quickly needed smarter tools to read tariff schedules, track product codes, analyze costs, and interact instantly with customs updates.
So, they turned to AI to survive in a new era of rapid, deep, and unpredictable tariffs.
Companies turned to AI to keep up with tariffs. They found that AI is capable of reading vast amounts of complex documents, connecting the dots across departments, and responding faster than human teams.
Salesforce created a powerful AI agent that can scan and understand the United States instantly.
A unified tariff schedule (4400 pages) for companies to identify every possible product category and the associated fees.
Kinaxis used AI to enable companies to run live simulations of their supply chain, showing what would happen if they changed part of their operations.
In this way, companies will know how to maintain production continuity while cutting costs and avoiding new tariffs. Wipro integrated traditional machine learning with new generative AI systems to quickly analyze global trade routes, supplier locations, shipping paths, and tariff costs. The system then recommends how to reroute shipments, switch to cheaper suppliers, or adjust sourcing strategies, ensuring companies maintain their flexibility and competitiveness even as rules change constantly.
These artificial intelligence systems have taken on tasks that were huge, fast, and extremely complex that human teams could not manage independently. These tasks include tracking new trade policies as they occur, scanning global supplier data for vulnerabilities, modeling hypothetical scenarios for cost impact, and suggesting better decisions that balance speed, savings, and compliance.
A lifeline for large companies, but what about other businesses? Large companies have the money, talent, and data needed to train AI tools properly.
AI has made them flexible and smart enough to respond instantly to changing trade rules and protect their profit margins in ways that legacy systems or manual processes simply cannot match.
But many small companies do not have enough money to purchase AI tools, hire experts to build custom models, or gather the clean real-time data needed for AI systems to function correctly and provide useful insights. AI is often portrayed as magic, but the truth is that its quality depends on the quality of the data it deals with.
If a company cannot provide accurate, up-to-date, and well-organized data about its products, suppliers, logistics services, and costs, even the best AI systems will not achieve the results that large companies are already achieving. AI has become a lifeline in this context, helping companies deal with unpredictable policies.
But the deeper question posed is: Will this artery also represent a ladder that allows small companies and resource-limited actors a way to ascend into the future, or will it remain just a crutch for the stronger to maintain their leadership while others fall further behind?
KEY Difference Wire helps cryptocurrency brands achieve success and dominate headlines quickly.