Janine:

Okay, let's get started. Thank you everyone for joining us today and welcome to our spring product announcement where we're gonna introduce to you today our genius Company Profiler. My name is Janine Krish and I am the head of marketing at Import Genius. And I'd like to introduce you to James Orr, our chief product and technology officer, as well as Daniel Mikhail, our senior account Executive. Gentlemen, why don't I give you each a moment to say a little bit about yourselves?

James:

Sure. Thanks Janine. Hi folks. I'm James and I've been working in tech since round 2001. I graduated from my computer science degree right into the.com bust. I got started in aerospace engineering and later I worked in enterprise government solutions before finding my way to import Genius. Over the years, I have moved from coding and software architecture to product leadership, and today as IG’s chief product guy, I get to help our technical teams build cool new stuff and bring it to market. 

Janine:

Daniel, over to you. 

Daniel:

Hey everyone, I'm Daniel. And over the last half decade I've worked with hundreds of businesses to help them navigate global trade by turning complex supply chain data into clear opportunities for their businesses. At Import Genius, I work with companies in practical ways to help strengthen supply chain visibility, stay ahead of competitors, and uncover new paths for growth. Thanks for having me, and I'm looking forward to the conversation. 

Janine:

Thank you. Okay, so before we get started, just some quick housekeeping. We are going to be taking questions during the last 10 minutes, so throughout this webinar, feel free to drop your questions in the Q&A, which you'll see on your screen, and we will do our best to get to them. So without further ado, James, I'd love to pass it off to you. 

James:

Great, thanks Janine. All right. Hi folks. Welcome to our latest webinar. Today  I'm just gonna take a few minutes to fill you in on Import Genius, our company and the surprisingly wild world of global trade data. What I want you to hear today is that we're an American company that works closely with our customers. We're working with a lot of new cool tech, including machine learning and AI, and, and we've got a packed product roadmap this year. So today we're announcing the first of several big releases for 2025. We're gonna show you our new AI powered research tool and how it works, and we'll have some time for Q&A. 

So to kick it off regarding the state of global trade, I'm not gonna waste any time in the webinar getting you up to speed on what everybody knows. If you're here, you're involved in trade, but I don't even need to know that about you to assume that, that you've heard about the situation. I've got my elderly aunt sending me tariff stories on Facebook. They're, they're not good stories. Like we're talking like a deep fake Elon Musk saying that you can avoid tariffs by buying his new cryptocurrency. But this is a rare historical moment where our industry is at the center of public attention worldwide. You know, if we thought that ever given getting stuck in the Suez Canal, got people that pay attention to trade, this is a whole other level. It's a time of disruption, uncertainty, and opportunity. If for years we've worked directly with major newsrooms to publish stories based on insights from our trade data, which changed is that these stories have moved from the business section to the front page. 

Global trade has been destabilized for our customers in the US. Costs are going up for those that trade with the US costs are going up. Even if they don't fall into those two categories, there's a lot to worry about. The situation is changing too quickly. You might be rolling out a strategy based on conditions that could shift under your feet. For example, our senior researcher was telling me that Apple's trying to move some of their iPhone assembly from China to India to avoid some of the tariff costs, but China's blocking the export of their equipment out of the country. If you're like our big enterprise customers, you might be just taking a pause until the dust settles and extremely worried about this year's targets. But for small and medium businesses, which is the majority of our customers, this isn't just a storm that they can weather, it is brutal and it is hitting them the hardest. 

What we're hearing is a need for visibility. Visibility into their competitors and their strategies. Visibility of entities that could represent new partnerships or suppliers or customers. The ability to see how individual companies or whole industries are exposed to risk. So we can't hand you the strategy that's gonna keep your business afloat, but we have a tool for your toolbox that can help you to tackle these challenges. In the face of uncertainty, our customers need facts to make plans, and in our industry, there's nothing more factual than the bill of lading. It's the atomic unit of trade data. It's undeniable record, proven the movement of one bit of goods from A to B. And in the field of trade intelligence, which is what we do at Import Genius, we've found ways to collect and aggregate those facts by the billions. Each one is a spec on a canvas and it looks chaotic up close. But if you step back, you start to see a picture of global trade activity. Trade data is full of patterns and trends and even secrets if you know how to find them. 

We've worked with reporters and academics and law enforcement to tease out these kinds of secrets, but these are just examples that I'm using to illustrate the power of trade data. These are pretty cool headlines, and this is what I bring up when somebody asks about my job. My dad still doesn't understand what we do, but today we're here to talk about the meat and the sandwich, the business use case for trade data. What's your exposure to Chinese tariffs and how does it compare to your competitors? Where, where can you find new suppliers for goods that are now unsustainably expensive? Are there alternate schemes to ship or process goods that could mitigate risk? We, we can help you answer some of these questions. 

The trade data marketplace is more crowded than when we got started 17 years ago. In fact, there's a pretty shady foreign black market for this stuff. But we're pretty confident that we stand apart. You know, we're an established US company and we have a sophisticated data acquisition strategy. We have global relationships with customs agencies and vendors who are as close to the source as we can get. An extreme example is that we've got people on the ground scanning documents in ports on the eastern seaboard to capture paper-based export data that you can't get any other way. And those scans, along with lots of other sources, feed into data pipelines that connect into our infrastructure. We've got an amazing data team who refine and load that data to make it all searchable in our system. 

So we are a trusted brand with exclusive connections and world class data engineering. But what does that mean for our customers? It means that we have the timeliest updates. So for example, we have a direct relationship with US Customs and Border Protection. So we get US Maritime imports updated daily for many others. We're able to acquire new data first. So for example, we're getting US Mexico border trade, land, air, and sea ahead of any other company. Our customers get that weeks before anyone else, and once you start relying on this data days, let alone weeks can be a big deal. And we are comprehensive. We're processing raw customs data at the earliest stage, so we know that we're working with the most complete sources available. And our data team is pretty amazing. I won't go into the technical details, but suffice to say we aim for world class data governance. All right, so now we're gonna have Janine run our first poll. 

Janine:

Okay, thank you. So to the audience, bear with me. Our first question, how are you currently researching trade partners or prospects? You could take a moment to vote, give you a couple more seconds. I see a lot of a lot of people responding. Then I'm gonna share the results so you can all see, okay, I think we have critical mass here. Let's see. Okay, interesting diverse responses. Okay, let me share the presentation again. Here we go. 

James:

Alright, thanks for voting and hey, Import Genius users, we see you in there. Thanks for coming. So you've had the spiel about our company and what we do, but today we're here to talk about some new stuff. We've got an ambitious technology roadmap. We're continually enhancing our traditional tools, but we're also making more use of machine learning, large language models and agents, all the buzzwords that are around these days. And we've cooked up some really exciting new ways to deliver value to our customers. The first project just hit the market, and it's targeted specifically for our users who are looking for company information, researching competitors, finding new suppliers and customers. If you've been keeping up with ai, you've probably heard the word agents or agentic AI a lot of times this year. It's, it's okay if you don't follow this stuff. An AI agent takes the large language models that you already use, like chat GPT, and it builds on that. Instead of being a system that takes in a prompt and gives you back a response, it can make plans and go off and execute multi-step tasks on your behalf. 2025 is the year of agents as far as the tech industry's concerned. And you've probably seen Agentic features popping up in other systems that you use or in advertisements. Agents are automating sales workflows and creating large software systems, providing voice-based customer service, and they are very good at doing research. So that brings us to our main topic. The Genius Company Profiler. 

The company profiler concept was really brought to us by our customers. When our sales team demos the product for somebody, we've got a technique where we work with them to figure out what problems they can solve with trade data. And usually right on the call, we can zero in on that and pull up something that intrigues them. Some bill of lading appears on the screen and the next question is always, oh, okay, that company there, who is that? Where was the info, right? Well, that's a bill of lading. It is one of a billion, and that company name was hand entered by somebody and it's probably got a typo in it, and hopefully there's an address to go along with it, but it's not the complete answer that you're looking for. So the entered traditionally has been to go and do research. You're gonna use whatever tools you've got to search and crawl the web, see what evidence you can gather to identify this company and what they do. 

The hard part is that you probably wanna do this a lot. If you've got evidence from a trade data search that there are 10 or a hundred companies that could be good candidates for the notion that just struck you this morning while you were having your coffee. Now having a swarm of AI agents go and run this research for you isn't just convenient, but it's gonna let you make moves in a way that you just couldn't do before. Some of our customers are also using company info or sales intelligence services like S&P or ZoomInfo. There's a bunch of them and they're great for looking up companies, but they didn't, they do tend to have a problem with the long tail. You don't need an AI agent to dig up Intel on a Fortune 500 company, but small and medium businesses, especially internationally, number in the millions, and they're not nearly as well represented in the traditional services. So we've found that agentic AI web research is the best way to deliver company data with more coverage for smaller sizes and global locations. And now for Import Genius users, it is built into the product. We're really excited about it and in a minute, Daniel's gonna show us what it looks like. Alright, I think it's time for Janine to bring up our second poll. 

Janine:

Thank you James. Here we go. So poll two, what's your biggest challenge when it comes to global sourcing or trade data? If you could take a moment to share your responses. See the answers still coming in. Okay, let me share the results. Great, thank you. I'm gonna pass it over to you, Daniel.           

Daniel:

Yeah, and thanks everyone for who participated in that poll. It's clear that many of you are facing multiple challenges when it comes to global sourcing and trade data, whether it's finding trust, trustworthy suppliers, understanding your competitive landscape, or making sense of the sheer amount of data that's available. In fact, with, you know, almost a quarter of you selecting all of the above, it just highlights how interconnected these issues really are. Before I get started, I'm going to do a brief overview of what the Import Genius platform is. We're a US-based trade data platform founded in 2007 with tens of thousands of customers worldwide. We're considered the source of truth when it comes to North American trade data, and that's critical because AI is only as powerful as the information that you feed it. Our AI profiler ingests the most complete and up-to-date trade data available, combining it with publicly available information across the web to build a deep, real-time understanding of global supply chains. With that in mind, I'd like to show you our genius company profiler that helps solves the, solve the exact challenges that you guys voted on by turning complex trade trade data into actionable insights that drive smarter sourcing, better competitive intelligence, and more targeted sales strategies for your business. 

I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here on a slide deck. So this is the first scenario that I'm gonna walk you guys through and it's for supply chain diversification. As we dive into this real world example, we're gonna be looking at a major retailer slash manufacturer who's currently sourcing textiles exclusively from a network of suppliers in China. Given the risks around tariffs and potential trade sanctions, they need to quickly diversify their supply chain. I'm gonna hop out of the slide deck here. Oops. And I'm just gonna go into the Import Genius platform. So inside the Import Genius platform, I ran a search for textiles, then aggregated all of the data by country of origin and TEU volume. What immediately stood out to me is that India is the world's largest producer of textiles, a great alternative for a retailer, a large retailer looking to mitigate their China exposure. I then filtered the fault, the filtered the data further to only highlight Indian manufacturers who are shipping textiles into the US by TEU Volume. From this to key suppliers emerged “Welspun” and “Scaps”, who together account for 70% of India's textile exports into the US. 

For this example, we're gonna dig into “Welspun”. Their name is highlighted in blue, and by clicking on it, we can open their AI generated company profiler page. On this page, we can see a detailed overview of their background, core business focus, key value propositions, market share, industry reputation, competitors, and strategic initiatives. All within a matter of seconds. I'm just gonna, in the the platform walk you through that. So you can see the product and services tab, product categories, discontinued offerings, new product offerings, their competitors direct and indirect, and the competitive advantages they hold over some of their competitors. 

Janine:

Daniel, just quickly wanted to check if you're sharing your screen, I've had a few people say they can't see it. 

James:

That's strange. I, I can see it over here. 

Janine:

Maybe you're sharing your window versus your whole screen. 

Daniel:

Okay. Lemme just double, 

Janine:

Just try it again and, and okay. Actually a few people are now saying they can see it, so I don't, I'm not sure if, okay, 

Daniel:

No 

Janine:

Problem. Like another a, a bunch of people are saying they can see it now. Okay, thanks everyone.           

Daniel:

Great. Okay. And so in this portion I can look at the financial performance of a company. And so when I'm choosing a new supplier, in this case, you know they're a major player in the Indian space, but maybe they're not and you don't want to send a major order to a new supplier that is gonna go bankrupt or has, is having financial issues. And then lastly here, you can click into contact info. You can add contact info, but let me just go show more. You can see titles, contact info, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And all of this is being added on the fly by AI. 

I'm next gonna click in and scroll a little further down into “Welspun”. I want to get visibility into their top US customers, their preferred ports of entry and their shipment consistency over time. Critically here we see that “Welspun” has been supplying Walmart and IKEA for more than five years, consistently, consistently, which signals they have the experience and the capacity to meet the high volume, high quality orders that my retailer will need in the textile space. This level of insight reduces a major sourcing risk and positions your business to negotiate with confidence and leverage within your existing supply chain and with new potential suppliers. 

I'm gonna jump into the second example here. Slideshow, share again. So in scenario two, we're gonna look at competitive analysis and a growth plan for a business. As we dive into the second real world example, I know that we all use and love olive oil, but most of us don't know how competitive that landscape really is in the trade space. In this scenario, we're gonna be working with an importer and manufacturer of olive oil, who urgently needs to identify their competitors and new market opportunities to reshape their Q2 strategy. I'm gonna jump over into the Import Genius platform here. Whoops. And now that we're inside the Import Genius platform, I ran a search for olive oil as a product, then aggregated the data by time and gross weight in kilograms. What I see in this line graph is that over the last five years, demand for olive oil imported into the US has remained constant or slightly decreased without a major increase in demand and maybe even a slight decrease over a period of time. Olive oil, oil importers and manufacturers need to fight for market share to ensure the growth and sustainability of their businesses. Knowing who your competitors are, knowing who your competitors are, who they're selling to, when their shipments are arriving, how much product they're bringing into the market will drive your executive business strategy on manufacturing, quantity, sales, and timing. If your business is operating without this type of intelligence already you're behind the rest of the market. 

Let's take this a step further as investigative researchers, and let's pretend we're working in enterprise sales for one of these olive oil importers or manufacturers. What would I do if I was looking for new customers in a market that's not necessarily growing? I've clicked into the AI profile of certified origins to identify why they have such a large piece of the olive oil market. And I scrolled over to about company and I've taken a look at their competitive landscape and financials and I was in quickly able to understand who they're competing against, what their competitive advantages are and what their profit margins are hovering at. This company has gone to great lengths to conceal their customers. They have set up a local entity to receive their shipments under a blanket name that are repackaging and distributing those as a way to conceal their activity from the competition. 

Because Import Genius has comprehensive trade data, I was able to quickly identify the shipment in which, for whatever reason, they expose their end user, their end customer. And even though it may be for a small percentage of the shipments that are labeled that way, we were able to identify who they're selling to. In this case, I was able to identify that that customer is Costco Wholesale and based on the data, Costco is buying shipments of olive oil from this brand, asking them to brand it Kirkland Signature. And they're making the purchase in the sixth month of every year. So annually I'm seeing these shipments come in from this company getting branded Kirkland signature. I can see the weight, the volume, and I know when they're buying it. If I was one of the competitors of this olive oil company, I would know that I have a one month window from today to infiltrate and close a deal with Costco before that Windows closed until 2026. I would then repeat this process for every single one of my competitors to uncover the timing and the appetite for olive oil at every major potential customer. I would create a calendar and I'd strategically target those organizations at the right timing with the right message to increase my market share in a no growth market. 

These practical examples and challenge-based scenarios show how critical, or sorry, show how Import Genius transforms raw trade data into strategic intelligence, helping you source smarter, sell better, and stay ahead of your competition. I invite you to register for a personalized demo tailored for your business, your industry, and your competitive landscape, and see potentially what you've been missing out on. Janine, I believe you're gonna drop a link in the chat where everybody can sign up for a one-on-one session. I'd love to see you all there. Thanks. 

Janine:

Awesome. Thank you so much, Daniel. I just popped that into the chat, so feel free to click on that live link and you can slot in some time with anyone on our sales team and we'll just personalize and show what this could look like for your business. It doesn't matter if you are a really small business or you're a large enterprise, we have a whole team that can help and tailor demos. Okay, moving on. There are a number of questions, so feel free to keep plopping them in the Q&A and we're gonna do our best to get to them 'cause we do have some time. First question was, and I've, I've received a few of these, are you going to share the presentation with us? The answer is “yes”. We're gonna share the presentation and tomorrow we're gonna actually send out a recording of this entire webinar so you can also forward that to your friends or colleagues or anyone else who would wanna watch this. Okay. Let's talk about, gimme one moment. The question we've received the most, which is, I think gonna go to you, James, where does your data come from? 

James:

Oh boy. Yeah, I, you know, I did mention in the introduction that we have a  pretty sophisticated data acquisition strategy. In fact, we've got a couple of folks who that's their whole job. But yeah, where trade data comes from, I mean, in the case of the United States, technically US maritime imports are a matter of public record. So if you have a relationship with the customs agency and you're an American company, you can arrange to get that data in a, in a pretty raw unprocessed form. But it's been public domain since an act of Congress in like the 1700’s or something like that. So that's an interesting one. But from there it goes all the way to stuff that's really hard to get, including people that collect data from customs agencies in other countries and act as vendors or Go-Betweens to provide us with that data. 

So, you know, sometimes the updates aren't daily, but they'll end up being monthly instead. Or if a, if trade data's coming from a less stable area of the world, then we take what we can get, we bring it all into the pipeline and integrate it. So I'll, so I could answer a little more specifically. You know, for example, we have Russian trade data as well as data from Ukraine, several African nations, and sometimes, you know, this can blink on and off or we're limited to the data that exists that we can get. But yeah, it's, it's an interesting topic and, and certainly it it comes from all over. 

Janine:

Thank you. James. You may have touched on this somewhat, but we had another question that I asked. Are we getting the competitor comparison data in a company profiling from external sources or from the data we are having as per the shipments? 

James:

Sure. So the V one of our deep research tool is a, is a web-based crawling research tool. So similar to maybe deep research tools you might've used from AI companies like Perplexity or, or Google Gemini. So it's really a compliment to our trade data at the moment. And, and actually, and I think I could knock out a second question here from Pavlo Tel who's asking about the reality of the information. Pavlo, it's, it's a great question because having AI's produce information, you know, there's, it's, it's a very common topic that we we're not a hundred percent trustworthy of AI generated info. So we do our best to what to do what's called grounding, and that's where you'll find links back to sources in these research nuggets. There will, there'll be a URL included to say, well this is what it looks like for this one and here's the, here's the link where we found that information. So we, if you need to verify something, you can go and and visit it and check it out for yourself.          

Janine:

Thank you. I'm gonna ask Daniel the next question. What markets are covered? Like, are we global, regional? 

Daniel:

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So we cover specifically in North America, all imports into the US and all imports into North America that are publicly available. We have data sources from all over the globe, and so we have a very complete picture of global data, but it is all public, public and private data on the private side, it's whatever we vetted and we believe is a source of truth and accurate data. We, we purchase those private data sources as well, but in terms of the completeness of the data, it's one of the most complete platforms in trade data in the world. 

James:

Sure. And Daniel, I could add onto that a bit. What to say that we can certainly proudly put ourselves forward as, as one of the most complete or the most complete, but in terms of being a comprehensive global resource, trade data is fussy and sometimes we refer to it as Swiss cheese. You know, it's, it's a real task to figure out and acquire and get it all. And you know, if a country is at war for a few months of the year and customs just isn't doing that recording at that time, then that data has lost forever. So we're always stitching together what we've got, 

Janine:

One question we just got, is there an extra cost for the Genius Company profiler? 

Daniel:

So the Genius company profiler comes with all of our annual subscriptions. So any customer who signs up with us on any American North American or global data pack that is on an annual subscription, you'll have the Genius company profiler and every other tool that's coming out in the roadmap included into your package.           

Janine:

Great. Okay, next question from Michael. If shipments are brought into the US via Vancouver port, then cross the border via rail, are those shipments visible using import genius? 

James:

Right. Well, you know, we have another question about Canadian data as well. And Canada famously or notoriously for us does not release customs data, not not at the bill of lading level. And so it's, it's not among our data sets. So we don't have, you know, we have maritime imports that originate in Canada, but we don't have land crossing from Canada. So no, that's one of the, one of the missing areas. But there are always ways that we can sort of impute and work backwards to synthesize some information. And this actually goes to one of the other questions that's popped up a couple of times, which is the, the hidden consignes, right? So if you, if you register and fill out the paperwork and apparently it's pretty onerous, but you can do it, you can hide your name from customs records in the United States Maritime import data, which by the way is just one of dozens of data sets that we offer. 

So you'll see blank cones through there and it's definitely a challenge that creates, you know, another, another dark area to navigate. But there are ways to impute and work around some of this stuff. For example, one of our other data sets is the Panama Canal, and you'll find bill of lading numbers, container numbers that match up exactly in the Panama Canal where there is no policy available to blackout the names of Consignes. So that's often a way that through a multi-data set set up, you can actually back out that data and fill in missing information. 

Daniel:

The, the answer to the question in, in short is that it's not something that we claim to have, but there's still a lot of it in the system that exists. And so I don't wanna say that you're gonna see every shipment coming through into the US via a Canadian port, but you're certainly gonna see a percentage of them. 

Janine:

Daniel

Daniel:

I and vice versa. 

Janine:

Oh, thank you. One question for you. How does Import genius compare to Descartes and Volza 

Daniel:

Other? Yeah, it's a good question. Our tool is the only one that I'm aware of on the market that has integrated ai and we have strategic partnerships with North American trade data vendors in, in terms of US customs. All of that is publicly available when it comes to the US land, air, and rail data. We're the exclusive vendor of that data and we're getting it significantly ahead of anybody else in the market. And then we have people on our team like Michael Kanko, our CEO, who sit in front of Congress on a, on a weekly and monthly basis petitioning for more supply chain transparency. So not only are we the TA data trusted partner, but we are the person who's, who's working on your behalf to, to get more of this data for you. So whether it's the news government and federal agencies or or or anything else, private organizations we're the source of truth for data. 

Janine:

Thank you. Next question, land crossing into Mexico from USA or Canada is not reported correct, but they're asking if that's correct. 

Daniel:

No land data from Mexico into the US is reported. This is a big change. You're gonna be able to see truck rail and air data entering and exiting the US stopping in Mexico. So if any near shores ha nearshoring has been happening from China to Mexico, you'll be able to see that direct path through ocean freight data into Mexico and then the land transit into the US And in that Mexico dataset, you'll also be able to see information about tariffs, freight costs, taxes, customs, brokerage numbers, and, and commercial value as well. 

Janine:

Thank you. 

James:

That's our most recent acquisition and it's a real beast. It's, it's been incredibly popular. 

Janine:

I have another question about how soon will the Genius company profiler be available to use as this is a recent innovation release. 

Daniel:

It's available. It was available a month ago and I'll continue to develop and work, but the nice thing about AI is that it doesn't have to go down to continue to develop. We have a team that's daily pushing out releases, sometimes weekly, sometimes daily, and, and the tool is constantly getting better. So the more people we have on it using it, giving feedback, the better it gets. We've certainly had it internally in beta for a while and it was released last month in, in full spec and, and it's going, 

James:

Yeah, bit of a soft open. I, I consider the webinar today to be the, the big event as far as launching our new tool goes. But actually, you know, Daniel, the, the contact info that you were showing from the profiler tool that, that just went live, I think yesterday the team got it in time, so we were pretty excited rehearsing our webinar that, that we had that extra feature. But yeah, it's, it's improving all the time. 

Janine:

There's a, a past customer who says that he used Import Genius in the past, which was good, but had a lot of work trying to find names that were hidden on the bill of lading. So he's wondering if the Genius company profiler would help alleviate this issue. 

James:

I think that would be a great question to bring up in an individual demo. We have a research team as well as some enterprise folks who can work on more specialized data inquiries. It really depends on the industry and what you're after, but you know, of course we can't reveal data that just isn't there, but there are a lot of tricks and our research team is quite good. So for your particular inquiry, I I encourage you to reach out. 

Daniel:

Yeah, and in the past, working with very large enterprises who specifically need to see certain things, we've been able to go and pull customer reports and look at things and manipulate the data in ways where we can from a different perspective potentially instead of necessarily the, the US import per perspective, but the country of origin, export perspective, be able to uncover that data for you. And so there's a lot of mirroring, there's a lot of strategies, there's a lot of manipulation that we can do. And then now in conjunction with the AI profiler, I mean, it, it's better than it's ever been. Like James said, we can't show you data that doesn't exist, but if it exists, you can find it very quickly. 

Janine:

If, okay, next question. If the shipment coming through China, if the shipment is coming through China to the US will Import Genius be able to give us an email notification? 

Daniel:

Absolutely. Yeah. So anything globally entering the US by Ocean Freight, you'd be able to set up alerts, email notifications, recurring reports you can follow certain companies. There's a lot of things that you can do within the platform. So if there's a specific company from China that you're, you're tracking, you can absolutely see that. 

Janine:

Great. This one is for James. What AI are you using? Is it chat? GPT? 

James:

Oh, sure. Well, I don't want to, I don't wanna get too techy for our audience today, but we we're building a foundational system for AI services built on top of our trade data and we're doing what's called a bring your own model approach that allows us to swap out different models to do the work when better stuff comes along. But currently OpenAI has been the leader for us for performance. We're using their 03 mini model to do this research work. 

Janine:

Great. Daniel, is there a free trial available for this tool? I know you get that question all the time. 

Daniel:

I do, I do get it all the time. No, there's no free trial available for the tool. The tool is very powerful and if you need more convincing on, on how the tool might work for your business, I recommend sitting down with any one of our account executives and, and going through a practical example for your business. I think in, in 10-15 minutes of looking and using the AI tool over a demo, and we can give you as many demos as you need, frankly, you'll be able to see the value for your business and make a decision from there. But, but in terms of giving out a tool, we're a data company at heart and, and we just can't give out data for free. 

Janine:

Okay. I have time for few more questions. Let's make it two more questions and then I have one last question. So what else James is on your product roadmap for 2025? 

James:

There's a bunch. Oh man. It, it's a busy year for us, but I think the most exciting stuff has to do with what we call data enrichment and imputation. So this takes the data that we already have and sell and just finding ways to add more value to it. So for example, being able to like find out who the company is and get all that information is maybe a form of data enrichment like we're announcing today. One of the biggies that we hear about all the time from our customers is the US Maritime Import dataset. It's, you know, it's one of our main products. It's what everybody generally does a lot of their work on. It famously does not include HS codes. The, the Customs and Border Protection has never put HS codes into that data. They're just not there. A lot of our other global sets, including US, Mexico border, they do have that stuff, but it's missing. And this is, it's pretty key. So actually we're gonna have a release, I'm hoping pretty soon. I, I don't wanna start saying dates and get anybody in trouble, but we've trained a machine learning model. We have all these other data sets with billions of rows in them. We take the HS code from that and the description that goes along with it. We use those pairs of data to train a giant machine learning model. And then we run that same model on the US maritime set and it makes a pretty good guess of what the HS code is for any bill of lading. You know, it's, it's not a hundred percent, but we've got it well into the nineties according to our testing. And so this gives you something where now you can take, you know, thousands of bills of lading from US Maritime and start aggregating them by product type or searching on HS codes or, or whole product classes. I think it's gonna be really neat. So imputed HS codes, that, that's one that I'm pretty excited about. 

Janine:

Awesome. Very exciting. You're ahead. One last question from the audience and then one last question from me, Daniel, do we have search limits? 

Daniel:

Yeah, that's a question that we get a lot. So there are search limits in place and download limits in place, but that's because we're a data platform and what we don't want is somebody coming in and downloading the whole platform and then reselling it for 99% of our users. They'll never hit those search limits. For the larger guys, the 1%, you know, the fortune five hundreds, they may hit a search limit. You can just then reach out to your account executive and say, Hey, I'm a business. I've hit a search limit, I've hit a download limit. This is exactly what I'm trying to do. And we'll increase those search limits for you. They're more for protection of our business than they are to, to stop you from looking at the data and using the data. 

Janine:

Thank you. Okay. I have one last question for Daniel. And, and just a note to everybody else, there are so many great questions that I'm seeing. I will promise we are going to reach out to you personally and do our best to answer you. So don't worry if we haven't gotten to you. We're recording all these questions and we're going to get back to you. So thanks for taking the time. Okay, Daniel, what is, you know, from all the calls you sit in on and, and you know, talking to clients and prospects, what is the one key takeaway you want to leave people with, whether they are a small business, a medium business, an enterprise Fortune 500 company, what do you wanna leave them with today? 

Daniel:

Good question. I would say that everybody, and this includes James's grandmother knows and sees information on the news about trade and sanctions and tariffs, but how many people are actually going into the nitty gritty and understanding how this trade data and tariffs and, and supplier diversification actually affects their business. You know, I sit in on conversations all the time from, from the manager level all the way up to the C-suite, whether that's directors or VPs, and they're looking to guide their businesses and they've never used this type of trade intelligence. And, and, and frankly, they don't even know that it exists. And, you know, we need to take that next step of, you know, we all hear and talk about trade data, just what is it that we're actually doing about the information that we're getting and how are we using that information to improve our businesses and, and make better decisions. So if that, if there was a key takeaway that would be the piece is, you know, be investigative. Make sure that you're utilizing the data that that exists to make the best decisions for your business and, and set yourself up for success. 

Janine:

Okay, thank you so much for that answer. I just wanted to leave everybody with a, you know, how they can get in touch. 

Daniel:

Oh, nice. I'm gonna get a lot of emails. 

Janine:

Yeah, you're gonna get a lot of emails. I've also plopped the, the demo form numerous times into the chat. Okay. So, you know, I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you all for joining us today. Thank you Daniel and James. This has been super insightful. I hope everyone who's here has a better sense of how they can use AI to find the right suppliers and customers better understand, you know, their own supply chains faster because this technology exists now. So thank you everyone. If you'd like a, a deeper dive, again, just click on that demo link. We'll also be reaching out to you via email so you can, you can respond to us. On behalf of all of us at Import Genius, thanks again for being here and look forward to seeing you at our next webinar. Have a wonderful day. Bye. Thanks everyone. 

Daniel:

Thanks.