Highlights
- Tariff volatility named the most disruptive regulatory change by 72% of trade professionals, up from 41% a year earlier.
- Only 7% of organizations use technology to manage tariff changes, and 5% for classification, despite surging AI interest.
- Connected regulatory content, classification, and screening workflows help trade teams respond to change with confidence instead of scrambling.
A year ago, a trade compliance director asked to name the single biggest threat to their operation might have pointed to a dozen different things — a supply chain gap, a new export control, a staffing shortage. Today, one answer dominates. In the Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 Global Trade Report, the share of trade professionals who named tariff volatility as the most disruptive regulatory change nearly doubled in a single year, from 41% to 72%. That’s not a shift in perception. It’s a shift in the job itself.
Trade teams are now being asked to do three things at once: respond to tariff changes in real time, classify products with more precision than ever, and keep every decision defensible enough to survive an audit. Organizations that treat those three demands as separate problems are increasingly the ones falling behind. The ones building an integrated approach are turning volatility into resilience — and resilience into an advantage.
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Why tariff volatility makes global trade resilience essential
Closing AI gaps in tariff management and HS classification
The connected workflows holding it all together
Why global trade resilience is a leadership priority
Global trade resilience is built, not staffed
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Why tariff volatility makes global trade resilience essential
The data leaves little room for wishful thinking. More than three-quarters of trade professionals surveyed — 76% — now believe U.S. tariff volatility represents a permanent, multi-year shift in how trade works, not a temporary policy swing. Supply chain management has jumped to the top strategic priority for 68% of respondents, nearly double the 35% who said so a year earlier. Regulatory compliance climbed too, cited as a top priority by 33% of respondents, up from 21%.
Underneath those numbers are real operational costs: heavier documentation requirements, deeper country-of-origin scrutiny, and more frequent secondary verification on shipments that used to clear without a second look. Trade teams are being asked to move faster and get more rigorous, at the same time, with the same headcount.
In practice, that permanence looks like a single 2026 Section 301 action covering 60 economies and reaching 99.4% of all U.S. imports, which took effect with almost no lead time for the trade teams it touched.
Closing AI gaps in tariff management and HS classification
Technology adoption is accelerating even faster than the pressure that’s driving it. The share of organizations exploring AI or blockchain for trade functions jumped sevenfold in a single year, from 6% to 40%. That’s one of the sharpest technology-adoption swings in the report’s four-year history.
But there’s a gap worth paying attention to. Despite that surge in AI exploration, only 7% of organizations currently use technology to manage tariff changes, and just 5% use it for classification changes — the exact two workflows generating the most volatility right now. General enthusiasm for AI isn’t the same as AI embedded in the specific compliance task that’s actually under pressure.
That gap carries real weight, too: trade compliance operates under a reasonable care standard that leaves little room for a fast wrong answer.
ONESOURCE Global Classification powered by CoCounsel is built to close exactly that gap. It applies generative AI to deliver fast, accurate Harmonized System (HS) code classification for import and export, built to be audit-ready from the start. For a workflow where only 5% of organizations currently use dedicated technology, that’s a meaningful head start.
The connected workflows holding it all together
Classification, screening, and regulatory research aren’t three separate tools competing for budget. In practice, they’re one workflow — and it breaks down wherever the pieces don’t talk to each other.
ONESOURCE Global Trade Content supplies the regulatory backbone: continuously updated content across more than 220 countries and territories, drawn from roughly 1,300 sources monitored daily, with most regulatory updates reaching the system within a single business day. When tariffs change overnight, that speed is the difference between acting on current information and acting on last week’s.
Increasingly, that content reaches trade teams through APIs embedded directly in the workflows where sourcing and classification decisions actually happen, rather than a separate portal someone has to remember to check.
Layered on top, ONESOURCE Global Trade Research powered by CoCounsel, resolves complex compliance questions in seconds instead of hours, with cited, AI-generated answers grounded in that same content. Its underlying technology has passed the last six U.S. Customs Broker License Exams — a concrete benchmark showing it performs at or above the level of a human expert, not just a plausible-sounding assistant bolted onto a search bar.
ONESOURCE Denied Party Screening adds the audit-readiness layer, screening customers and suppliers against more than 825 global denied-party lists — the kind of documented, defensible process that holds up when a regulator asks how a decision was made.
Put together, this is the shape of an integrated platform: trusted regulatory intelligence, AI that performs the actual compliance tasks, and infrastructure that connects them so nothing falls through the cracks between systems.
Why global trade resilience is a leadership priority
The stakes here go beyond process efficiency. Trade teams are gaining real influence inside their organizations — 43% of trade professionals report enhanced influence over procurement decisions, and 37% report more frequent involvement in executive decision-making. Trade is moving from a back-office cost center to a seat at the strategy table.
But that elevation comes with exposure. When leadership asks whether the organization is ready for the next tariff shift, a fragmented tech stack means a fragmented answer — one system for classification, another for screening, a spreadsheet holding it all together. An integrated platform means one answer, and it’s backed by evidence rather than assurances.
Global trade resilience is built, not staffed
More than half of trade professionals — 56% — already report increased workload as a direct result of tariff pressure. Adding headcount helps, but it isn’t the whole answer, and it isn’t fast enough on its own. The organizations pulling ahead are the ones following a practical roadmap toward connected infrastructure: regulatory intelligence, classification, and screening working as one system instead of three separate fire drills.
That’s what ONESOURCE Global Trade Content is built to deliver — a single, continuously updated source of regulatory truth that plugs directly into classification and screening, so your team can respond to the next change with confidence instead of scrambling to catch up.
See how ONESOURCE Global Trade Content keeps your team ahead of regulatory change → Request a demo
