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Wove speeds tariff change data for forwarders, TMS – and it’s free

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Wove speeds tariff change data for forwarders, TMS – and it’s free

Wove Is Using AI to Keep Up With the Rapidly Changing Tariff Landscape

The global tariff landscape has become increasingly difficult for freight forwarders, customs brokers and importers to keep up with.

At the beginning of 2025, one industry estimate projected more than 2.5 million rule changes across over 40 Harmonized Tariff Schedules during the following 18 months. With trade policies changing at a rapid pace, logistics companies are being forced to find faster ways to stay current.

Atlanta-based technology company Wove believes it has found a solution.

Founded in 2022, Wove originally focused on workflow automation for freight forwarders and customs brokers. Its technology helps companies process shipping documents, create shipments in CargoWise, prepare customs entries, automate emails and quotes, and handle other repetitive tasks.

But late last year, the company realized the same technology could be used for something much bigger: understanding the U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule.

“We realized about seven months ago, around the end of last year, that we could repurpose a lot of what we had built to understand the unstructured documents in shipping and logistics and apply that to the U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule,” Wove co-founder and CEO Jay Edlin said.

The challenge is that much of the HTS information is published through PDFs and other formats that are difficult to organize and search.

Around the same time, Flexport had also reduced access to its free tariff calculator for many users, creating an opportunity for Wove to build its own tool.

“HTS is published mostly in PDFs, so it’s unstructured and hard to really understand,” Edlin said. “This also coincided with Flexport removing access to their free tariff calculator for a lot of people.”

Wove decided to build its own tariff calculator over the holidays.

Within days of launching, the free tool began attracting users. Edlin said the tariff platform now receives thousands of users every week.

What started as a basic tariff calculator has since evolved into what the company describes as a “tariff time machine.”

Users can enter previous dates and compare how much an importer would have owed in duties at different points in time. That functionality has become especially useful for companies trying to determine potential refunds tied to tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.

“Ultimately, that became more of a tariff time machine because as these changes kept coming out, you could really use the tariff calculator and tariff simulator to go back in time and compare what the duties were on entry dates from last year,” Edlin said.

The company has also been helping businesses calculate possible tariff refunds.

IEEPA gives the president broad authority to regulate certain economic transactions during a declared national emergency involving an unusual or extraordinary foreign threat.

President Donald Trump used the law as part of his administration’s tariff strategy and trade negotiations.

Following a Supreme Court ruling that IEEPA did not authorize the president to impose the tariffs, U.S. Customs and Border Protection was faced with processing potentially tens of billions of dollars in refunds. Importers were also left dealing with a complicated process for identifying affected entries and calculating what they could be owed.

Meanwhile, the tariff environment has continued changing.

New trade measures have included Section 338 tariffs involving Canada and Section 301 tariffs targeting dozens of trading partners over allegations involving forced labor and manufacturing practices.

For companies that depend on accurate tariff information, keeping those changes updated manually can quickly become overwhelming.

Wove says it has automated much of that work.

“We’ve automated that entire process,” Edlin said. “Every time there’s an update in the Federal Register, we get a notification in Slack, and we have AI agents that then just go in and basically make all these changes automatically.”

Unlike a basic automation system, an AI agent can analyze a goal, determine what needs to be done and take actions to complete the task.

According to Edlin, Wove’s agents processed a recent Section 301 update totaling nearly 400 pages in about an hour.

That kind of speed could become increasingly important as trade regulations continue to change.

Wove initially offered the tariff platform largely as a free resource and lead-generation tool. More recently, however, importers have begun asking the company for ways to integrate the tariff data directly into their own systems through an API.

Other companies want to upload entire product catalogs containing their own SKUs, part numbers and HTS classifications.

“They wanted a product catalog concept where they could load their own SKUs with HTS codes and SKU numbers, part numbers, and things like that,” Edlin said.

The data is also being used outside traditional freight forwarding.

Academic researchers have accessed Wove’s tariff information, while importers and manufacturers are integrating the data into their Enterprise Resource Planning systems.

Wove’s capabilities are not limited to the United States. The company also supports imports involving Mexico, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Its customers include freight forwarders Hellmann Worldwide, Navia Freight, Future Forwarding and CBX Global, along with importers and manufacturers including Babcock Power, GreatNeck Tools, Roto and Wabtec.

Wove says one of the biggest differences between its platform and competing tariff tools is that the company itself is not a customs broker.

“Because we’re not a customs broker ourselves, we have no reason to gate anyone from accessing our data,” Edlin said. “That’s a little different from others that may offer similar tools. They have different incentives than we do.”

With tariff rules continuing to change at an unusually fast pace, tools capable of automatically interpreting and updating trade data could become increasingly valuable for freight forwarders, customs brokers and importers trying to stay ahead of the next change.

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