Flexport Debuts AI Tool to Streamline Tariff Refunds

It’s not quite clear when and if American businesses will receive refunds on tariff payments.

But assuming they go through, supply chain management firm Flexport said Thursday (Feb. 26) it has its customers covered with a new fleet of artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

These agents are designed to manage customs and prepare for potential refunds with an automated tariff refund process, Flexport said in a news release. Other tools include an AI agent for freight container optimization, and a real-time AI language translator.

“In 2025, U.S. tariff policies changed every one and a half weeks,” the release said. “The customs industry has declared 2026 the ‘Year of the Audit.’ Errors in customs filings are at an all-time high, while government enforcement is increasing.”

Flexport argued that last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling limiting the government’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs has made accurate entries even more important in preparing for refunds.

Flexport launched an AI agent that lets customers audit their customs broker by conducting a compliance audit on previous customs entries to spot mistakes and compliance errors.

“We first piloted the agent on our own entries,” said Ryan Petersen, Flexport’s founder and chief executive. “We have reduced our error rate on U.S. customs filings to 0.2%. Based on what we know of other customs brokers, we estimate this to be a 10X improvement to any other broker in the world.”

Writing about the tariff situation last week, PYMNTS said that the question now for chief financial officers (CFOs) is no longer “Will tariffs rise or fall?” but “How do we operate when cost structures, supplier relationships and capital needs can shift faster than our planning cycles?”

The court ruling answered a statutory question rather than an operational one, that report said.

It found that IEEPA cannot be used to justify tariffs, but it offered no prescription on what happens to duties already assessed or paid.

“That omission is more than procedural, and it can leave companies navigating a gray zone in which potential tariff refunds exist in theory, yet lack a defined administrative pathway,” PYMNTS wrote. “In many industries, tariffs imposed over the past several years have already been passed through to customers, renegotiated into supplier contracts, or capitalized into long-term inventory strategies. The financial record is settled even if the legal one is not. Recovering duties, should a mechanism emerge, will require untangling transactions that were never designed to be reversed.”