AI & Customs Series. Episode 4: on the future of customs professionals

In the fourth instalment of the "AI & Customs Series", CustomsClear's Enrika Naujokė speaks with Professor Albert Veenstra (Rotterdam School of Management) about how rising data requirements and new digital tools are reshaping what it means to be a customs professional — essential viewing for anyone planning training, hiring or process design in customs and trade compliance.

Topics covered:

• How the "data journey" will change as the Digital Product Passport, the EU Customs Data Hub and EUDR-related tools go live, and why compliance data increasingly needs to be sourced at the origin of the goods, not at the border
• Why companies currently rely on fragmented, single-purpose applications (CBAM, deforestation, Digital Product Passport, customs declarations) and the case for a shared supply-chain data platform instead
• The shift from customs professionals as "paper pushers" to "data quality managers" as machines take over routine data entry
• Gaps in current customs professional training identified against the formal European customs competence framework — especially IT knowledge and data management
• What a data management training module should include: structured data models, data quality management, and understanding the AI tools used to process compliance data
• How universities (illustrated by Rotterdam School of Management's Master's programme) are adapting curricula to combine legal, supply chain and IT knowledge
• Why the relationship between data errors and compliance errors is not one-to-one, and the human judgement needed to catch small errors before they "mushroom" into large-scale compliance problems

For a broader overview of the topic, please watch the full recording. The slides are available in the Resources section.

Please note that this summary was generated using AI, based on the recording and available slides.