As previously stated, customs organizations around the world have two primary concerns. First, they need to ensure that all goods are being taxed appropriately. Second, they are responsible for guaranteeing security and preventing prohibited goods from leaving and entering the country. The scale of cross-border commerce and travel makes it impossible for customs officials to manually review all customs paperwork and physically inspect every freight container, package, and passenger. Instead, they should use the huge volumes of data available to them to detect fraud and assess risks and then direct their workforce and enforcement efforts accordingly to achieve maximal results. The task for CIOs of customs organizations is to deploy the right tools for analyzing and processing the data, and then deliver those insights to customs analysts, inspectors and senior decision-makers in a way that allows them to make smart, well-informed decisions in a timely fashion. For example, many customs organizations are using outdated risk profiling engines to identify containers and shipments that are more likely to carry illegal goods or be involved in customs fraud. These outdated engines are built on business rules and risk profiles defined years ago, and therefore miss many customs violations and have poor success rates. In contrast, decision intelligence platforms using machine learning models can automatically pinpoint suspicious patterns and anomalies, analyze massive amounts of data from many data sources, and improve the model’s accuracy over time by analyzing historical data. Guided by decision intelligence-driven risk assessment models, customs officials can shift toward a highly targeted, more accurate enforcement approach and make smart decisions about which containers, shipments and packages to inspect. Shipments and passengers identified as high risk should be subject to inspection, while those individuals and firms who are low risk are cleared faster with limited use of customs resources. The Value of Decision Intelligence for Customs 9 Decision Intelligence 4