AI innovation is not a foreign topic for Ramps Logistics. The Cunupia-based company has been one of the early innovators in using the technology with significant success.
At the Energy Conference in February, Ramps Logistics was named the Innovation and Technology Challenge winner following its presentation of Mawi, a generative AI solution for customs brokerage, at the event.
Mawi would be recognised further, as in September the platform was named as a finalist in the category Best Logistics Strategy for an Energy Project at the 2025 Breakbulk Awards.
Much of this success can be traced back to the company’s vice president of technology, Kiran Deosingh.
Under Ramps CEO Shaun Rampersad’s guidance, Deosingh has been credited with leading the transformation of integrating AI and automation across the company’s operations.
He told the Sunday Business Guardian in an interview last week Friday that the company has invested significantly in the technology, hoping not just to blaze the trail but stay ahead of the curve.
“It’s definitely a huge investment. I think we are probably one of the top customers for some of the big AI companies OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini.
“We have some huge enterprise accounts with them, but we think that if we make this high investment now, it will pay off in the long run, for the other parts of the business. So we do invest in one side heavily, but when you see the returns in the amount of transactions that we could process later down in the pipeline, it does pay off,” said Deosingh in front of Ramps’ team of engineers at the company’s Cunupia office.
“We had this development team behind me creating applications for within the company and we used to take weeks sometimes months to get features out to the clients and to our users.
“Now with the advent of people, especially with the use of a tool called ‘Cursor’, we now create functionality, features, new releases of applications within days, and we get a lot better user feedback. So I would say, if you don’t keep up with the technology, you will get left behind using the older technologies. Then people will create new systems that could bypass you in the long run, and then Ramps will get left behind,” he said.
Deosingh explained that there was scepticism concerning the adoption of AI, particularly with regard to the potential reduction of job availability. However, the Ramps team soon learnt that the efficiencies served to bolster their operations significantly.
“When we now started it, everybody was concerned that AI may replace jobs and it may take over roles that would have already existed. But AI does save cost in a very key way. It allows the scale. Now we could be doing the same amount of transactions we do with the existing technology. But with the advent of AI, especially with our recent tool we created called Mawi, it allows us to do maybe five or 10 times the number of transactions with the same amount of resources. It’s very, very cost-efficient,” said Deosingh, who continued to sing praises for the in-house development.
However, he admitted there was still work to be done to improve usage.
Deosingh said, “I am very pleased with the success (of Mawi) right now. I think that we always try to look inward and see how we can improve the software better and get it to more of a global standard. But I feel the speed that we got to market it was something that we didn’t see a lot of other companies in our region accomplishing, and we’re very happy and proud of that, especially with the team that we built to get to that level of customer management.”
Being first in this instance has also meant the Ramps team has had to overcome growing pains with regard to the technology as well as convincing customers, not necessarily willing to trust AI technology, to buy in. Deosingh acknowledged this was a challenge but explained Ramps had employed strategies to address client concerns, with Rampersad himself taking the lead in that regard.
“We have our internal customers within Ramps itself as well as the external customers. So our first goal was to get the internal customers to buy into using AI. And a lot of people are resistant to change. But the biggest thing that made an impact is leadership.
“We were very fortunate for our CEO, Sean Rampersad, to be able to drive technology from the top come down and by that enforcement to the rest of the department. It allowed us to be like, ‘Hey, we have to use this tool if we want to succeed,” said Deosingh.
Deosingh continued, “We have to use this new technology that our team is implementing. But in order to help implement that as well, we took a different approach, where we integrated ourselves in the team. So we took members of our development team, put them to sit with the actual users and make them become a user, which then improves the software quality a lot more.”
The Ramps VP of technology said the team had to address concerns about privacy and cybersecurity in particular, explaining that the team had to show a level of transparency to its clients for that buy-in to be achieved.
“We have probably 50 customers lined up already wanting to use Mawi because of how much efficiency, how much it will save them. How much cost, in terms of classification costs, in terms of importing items into the country. But when we show them how our systems keep their data private and confidential, and we have our protection policies around those things, they are pretty much satisfied,” he said.
“It’s area that not a lot of persons want to openly talk about, but we take pride in sharing when certain incidents that do happen, whether it be something internally that doesn’t really have a big impact. But we want people to be comfortable showing that, hey, there was some sort of email incident that happened. This is how we learn from it, and this is how we improve, but more so along the question of making sure that customers feel satisfied, that our software is protected.”
Deosingh said there had not been a major breach with Mawi to date, but he said the company felt this was the best practice to follow.
“We want to let them know that we are comfortable bringing up issues and letting them feel comfortable talking to us, so that if there are issues, we will tell you we want you to be sitting and we are not going to hide any issues from you,” said Deosingh, who stressed embracing and learning the different elements of AI would continue to be a cornerstone of business globally.
