I stood in a room at Shanghai Customs University as a Member of the Management Committee of the International Network of Customs Universities during the opening session of the 2026 INCU Summer School. This year’s theme focused on Smart Customs and Technology Application, drawing customs officials and academics from China, Russia, and beyond for the same reason: to learn how artificial intelligence, single windows, and digital tools are reshaping our profession.
Standing at that podium and delivering a lecture on Digital Trade Facilitation, AI, and Customs Digitalization, it struck me how oddly fitting the setting was. We were discussing technology that promises to make customs faster and smarter, in a room built on the opposite premise that no country, however advanced, gets there alone.
Think about what smart customs actually requires. An AI risk-targeting model is only as good as the data and cooperation it can draw on from trading partners. A machine-learning classification tool is only trustworthy because every administration involved has agreed, in advance, to honor the same Harmonized System and the same General Rules of Interpretation. Even the most sophisticated non-intrusive inspection algorithm depends on standards set collectively by bodies like the WCO, not unilaterally by any single customs bureau. Strip away the cooperation, and the technology has nothing to stand on.
That is why gatherings like the INCU Summer School matter more than their ceremonial trappings suggest. A Chinese graduate student comparing notes with a Russian counterpart on how their countries approach AI-assisted valuation is not small talk, as it is exactly the kind of exchange that keeps smart customs from devolving into a patchwork of incompatible national experiments.
I could not help but think of home while I was there. The Philippines is in the middle of its own digitalization push, with our new Customs Processing System, our National Single Window slowly connecting seventy-two agencies, and our brokers learning to work alongside AI-assisted classification tools and digital workflows. None of that happens in isolation. Every lesson we borrow from a more mature system and every mistake we avoid because someone else already made it is a small dividend of exactly this kind of international academic cooperation.
For our own customs brokers reading this, the takeaway is not abstract. The next generation of our profession will be trained on tools and standards developed in rooms like the one I stood in last week, decided in Brussels, Shanghai, Geneva, and dozens of capitals in between, not in Manila alone. Staying current will increasingly mean staying connected: to WCO instruments, to regional single-window developments, and to what our neighbors are actually piloting, not just what we read about secondhand.
Smart customs, in the end, carries no passport. It belongs to the profession, including customs brokers, willing to keep learning from itself across every border it touches.
Samuel C. Bautista writes Ask the Customs Wiz column on customs, trade, logistics and workforce development. For your comments, email him – thecustomswiz@gmail.com
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