AI Helping Modernize Trade Across Asia And The Pacific, Though Adoption Gaps Remain
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Artificial intelligence is reshaping trade processes across Asia and the Pacific. However, despite growing interest, most economies have yet to deploy the technology at scale, according to a new study by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The Asia-Pacific Trade Facilitation Report 2026: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence in Trade Facilitation finds that AI implementation in trade facilitation stands below 15% among economies surveyed, with levels ranging from 1% to 40% across subregions.
AI is increasingly being used in customs and logistics systems across the region, including automated verification of shipping documents, machine learning tools to identify high-risk cargo and image analysis technologies used in border inspections. These applications can help reduce delays, improve compliance and strengthen supply chain resilience as economies face growing trade pressures and more complex regulations.
“The rapid development of AI and machine learning now signals yet another transformation, offering new opportunities to enhance efficiency, compliance, supply chain resilience and digital connectivity,” said Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCAP
She added that this transformation is particularly significant as the current global trade landscape faces growing challenges, including geopolitical tensions, increasing regulatory and compliance requirements related to climate risks and sustainability, as well as a persistent digital divide across economies.
Shortages in AI-related skills remain the biggest barrier to wider adoption, followed by high infrastructure costs, fragmented data systems and regulatory uncertainty. While many economies have expanded digital trade systems, gaps remain in data integration, interoperability and operational readiness.
“It is critical to support developing economies in strengthening digital infrastructure, cross-border connectivity, interoperable systems and digital skills to harness the benefits of AI-enabled trade facilitation,” said Fatima Yasmin, Vice-President for Sectors and Themes, Asian Development Bank.
East Asia leads the region in AI readiness across operational deployment, governance frameworks and data quality, while Pacific economies continue to face the largest implementation challenges.
Launched at the Asia-Pacific Trade Facilitation Forum, the report calls for stronger investment in AI-related skills, integrated digital infrastructure and governance frameworks to support secure and efficient digital trade. It also highlights the importance of regional cooperation and cross-border interoperability as trade systems become increasingly data-driven.
AI is a Public Resource: You Should Own Half of It
Photo by Aerps.com
Artificial intelligence will almost certainly be the most transformational technology in the history of the world. It will profoundly affect the life of every man, woman and child in our country. It will bring — and is already bringing — unimaginable changes to our economy, our democracy, our emotional well-being, our environment and how we educate and raise our children. Further, there is a very real fear that as A.I. becomes smarter than humans it could eventually function independently, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
The question, then, is not whether A.I. will change the world. It will. The question is: Who will own and control that future? Who will benefit from it, and who will be hurt by it? Will A.I. be used to make life better for working families? Will it enrich our quality of life? Will it help us eliminate poverty, extend life expectancies and solve the climate crisis? Or will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed A.I., with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?
That is the choice before us.
Let us be clear. Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations. That is not just the opinion of Bernie Sanders. According to Mr. Altman, the head of OpenAI, A.I. models were trained on our “collective experience, knowledge” and “learnings of humanity.”
For the most part, tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their A.I. models without permission, without acknowledgment, without compensation. In other words, the creative work of millions of people — writers, artists, musicians, journalists, teachers, scientists and ordinary citizens — has essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world. It’s time for us to reclaim it.
Since A.I. is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity. Not just Mr. Musk, Mr. Altman, Dario Amodei and other moguls whose companies are positioned to dominate the industry. Not just venture capitalists in Silicon Valley or money managers on Wall Street who undoubtedly see A.I. as the next great wealth-extracting machine.
That is why I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax, not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock.
This is originally appeared in the New York Times.
Amazon Is Using AI to Disempower Workers. The US Labor Movement Must Fight Back.
Amazon is using AI in terrifying ways to disempower workers. We must fight back.
By Jonathan Rosenblum ,
Beginning June 7, the AFL-CIO quadrennial convention gathers in Minneapolis with the stated aim of organizing “in unity and clarity of purpose to empower working people.”
That clarity of purpose ought to include a real commitment to take on the biggest and most important organizing challenge that unions face in this era — Amazon.
Thus far, notwithstanding some inspiring individual sites of struggle, the U.S. labor movement has failed to get Amazon to the bargaining table.
Nationally, union density last year was a measly 10 percent, continuing a historic decline, and that’s not even counting the members lost when Trump ripped up union contracts covering nearly a million federal workers.
That leaves tens of millions of workers to organize, but none are more crucial than the 1.5 million workers and contractors at Amazon.
Striking Spanish Workers Just Showed That Amazon Is Not Invincible
The workers used creative, disruptive tactics to win. Their victory holds lessons for the global labor movement. By Jonathan Rosenblum , Truthout January 23, 2026
Ninety years ago, General Motors was capitalism’s trailblazer, emulated by other industrialists seeking to hone productive efficiency, worker exploitation, and profit extraction. GM workers organizing under the CIO banner and resourced by unions that stood to gain no new members themselves from the project — like the United Mine Workers — pushed back against that exploitation, struck, and won new standards. They heralded in a period of mass organizing, the modern heyday of labor’s power.
Amazon is today’s General Motors. What happens to Amazon workers — good or bad — will happen to workers everywhere.
Amazon is a test bed for the future of work for all of us. Employers everywhere are seeking to imitate the behemoth’s labor model of exploitation, job instability, and — terrifyingly — the deployment of AI technologies to discipline and disempower workers.
Amazon is perfecting contracting out, just-in-time labor, and speedups. Its 250,000-plus U.S. drivers are all contracted out, either to a host of small businesses called delivery service partners (DSPs), or hired as independent contractors. That way Amazon can deny responsibility when drivers get injured, ask for more money, or try to unionize. Warehouses operate on a lean-labor model. Normal full-time warehouse schedules are four consecutive 10-hour shifts, but Amazon often cuts workers’ hours any time production slows, even in the middle of a shift, wreaking havoc on already tight family budgets. Then, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Amazon imposes mandatory overtime — an extra hour a day, plus an additional required workday every week — bringing the workweek to a brutal 55 hours and disregarding the effects on workers’ personal and family lives.
Amazon is today’s General Motors. What happens to Amazon workers — good or bad — will happen to workers everywhere.
Through its aggressive introduction of robots — now over 1 million — Amazon is replacing workers and forcing those remaining to work faster. It’s no wonder that Amazon workers get hurt on the job so often, and that the company’s serious injury rate is nearly double the rate of its warehouse industry peers.
Then there is AI. I know a bit about this directly, as I’ve worked for the last year and a half as a part-time Amazon delivery driver. The delivery service partner I work for is a fair employer, but it is not the problem; Amazon is, because while drivers technically are not employed by the company, we all are subject to its tracking and oversight.
When I’m in the Amazon truck, every movement I make is tracked with technology and evaluated by AI programs — where I am, which packages I’ve delivered, and whether it’s keeping pace with the algorithm that Amazon has determined I must meet. Readouts at the end of every shift show how each of my deliveries compared to the timing prescribed by Amazon’s algorithmic standard. We are evaluated every week on whether we took accurate photos on delivery, delivered the packages exactly where the customer requested, and got good or bad customer feedback. Through the system, drivers who don’t “make rate” or who don’t meet Amazon’s prescribed standards don’t stay employed.
What’s enabling this level of oversight? Big Brother: the “NetradyneDriver•i,” your ride-along buddy in the van. Camera lenses point in all directions, continually measuring your speed and distance. Netradyne also tracks whether or not you are making a complete stop at every stop sign, using your turn signal, avoiding lane drift, braking, accelerating, or cornering too fast. It watches your eye orientation and movement. Whether you yawn. If you look away from the road for too long. All of these data points are ingested into an AI system where technology, not a person, is evaluating your behavior every second. Netradyne boasts about this as “physical AI deployed at scale.”
Employers everywhere are seeking to imitate the behemoth’s labor model of exploitation, job instability, and — terrifyingly — the deployment of AI technologies to discipline and disempower workers.
In Reddit chat groups, Amazon drivers around the country now report being fired not by a human, but by AI.
For warehouse workers, Amazon has harnessed the same surveillance technology to make sure that workers’ pick, pack, and sort rates meet its algorithmically determined standards, that their scans are perfect, and that they’re minimizing “time off task” — like going to the bathroom. Everything is measured and tracked. And if you don’t “make rate,” then first you get counseled, then disciplined, then fired.
In many warehouses, Amazon utilizes security officers and local police to enforce “an organizational culture of near-carceral obedience — what amounts to a ‘militarization’ of human resource functions,” a recent academic report found. “It feels like we’re coming into prison, and they’re trying to make sure we don’t escape,” the report quotes one worker as saying.
This workplace dystopia is being perfected at Amazon, then exported to other employers — in factories, grocery stores, hospitals, restaurants, hotels, construction sites, laboratories, and offices.
This is the bleak future we are handing to our children — unless we organize Amazon at scale and fight back.
Amazon is not just a problem for those of us in the logistics industry. From a humble online book seller, Amazon has transformed in a generation to disrupt other industries. Its avariciousness is only growing. Amazon today operates 532 Whole Foods grocery stores and is rapidly building out its grocery delivery network. This is the next major industry that the company intends to upend.
Through Amazon Web Services, the company is now a dominant global provider of computing power, storage, networking, analytics, and security. Amazon makes its own Trainium AI chips, directly competing with Nvidia. Amazon produces and distributes film and television shows through its Amazon MGM Studios. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Amazon One Medical is a primary care health service with online and clinic care, and it’s moving aggressively into the prescription drug market with Amazon Pharmacy. Through its Ring subsidiary, Amazon today dominates the home security market, and it provides other leading consumer electronics such as Alexa and Kindle.
Can a company that big and expansive, a behemoth with nearly $3 trillion in market valuation, be beaten?
Yes, it can. But as a report published on June 4 emphasizes, it will take a herculean, all-in effort by the entire U.S. labor movement to beat back Amazon — not just the valiant but fragmented efforts we have seen thus far.
In Reddit chat groups, Amazon drivers around the country now report being fired not by a human, but by AI.
The report, Renewing Labor and Winning at Amazon, which I coauthored along with Michael McQuarrie and Benjamin Y. Fong, and which was published by the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, documents how in contrast to the 1930s, when CIO organizers were able to throttle production by striking at a few key production sites, the Amazon organizing project must aim wider. With a network of hundreds of warehouses, sort centers, and air cargo facilities, “the company has the agility to redirect package flow to other facilities, keeping the supply chain intact” and render single-site strikes largely irrelevant, the report notes, concluding that “today’s labor strategists need to recognize that in order to be successful, organizing must disrupt Amazon’s supply chain flow.”
That means organizing throughout entire regions or sections of the company’s supply chain. The report highlights two strategic regions in particular. The first is centered in the Los Angeles area and the Inland Empire just east of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where most of Amazon’s imported goods flow before being disbursed to warehouses nationally. The second comprises the Northeast region, which is home to a huge concentration of Amazon customers. The Teamsters union already is organizing in both of those regions, where workers doggedly have been taking on the company. But the scale of organizing to date is not equal to the challenge. In the company’s massive JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, the Amazon Labor Union, now part of the Teamsters, won a historic union representation vote in 2022. Four years on, notwithstanding persistent worker organizing, Amazon has yet to agree to recognize the union and bargain.
Hundreds of inside organizers — political activists who have taken jobs at Amazon to “salt,” or organize from within — have developed sophistication in organizing at Amazon in recent years, and must play an important role in any national campaign. The same is true for existing logistics, grocery, health care, and other union members. “UPS and DHL Teamster members have been especially effective organizers, sharing with Amazon workers a common language and common concerns about the supply chain work process, speedups, technology, and the problems posed by management,” the Renewing Labor and Winning at Amazon report notes. “They, along with union members in other sectors, can easily point to wins they have achieved through collective bargaining and striking that differentiate their working conditions dramatically from those of the Amazon workers.”
While organizing must be centered in the warehouses and geared toward building mass strike actions, the labor movement must envision — and fund — an all-encompassing campaign that draws in the public, other businesses, governments, and regulators. That’s because Amazon’s impact goes far beyond the workplace, and it will take pressure both inside Amazon’s supply chain and throughout society to force the company to deal with unions.
Tens of thousands of Amazon trucks pollute the air, harm public health, and degrade public roadways, and the tax breaks demanded routinely by Amazon starve local governments of the resources needed to provide public services.
“Communities in warehouse concentration areas, such as California’s Inland Empire, are ripe sites for uniting workers and community members in common campaigns against both exploitation in the warehouse and also against the externalized burdens that Amazon imposes on the community at large,” the report notes.
Amazon utilizes security officers and local police to enforce “an organizational culture of near-carceral obedience — what amounts to a ‘militarization’ of human resource functions.”
Because the National Labor Relations Board is not an effective pathway to force Amazon to bargain, unions must advance state and local ballot initiatives to advance key worker and community demands. This is not a novel concept. Fifteen years ago, the Fight for $15 drew on the power of ballot initiatives to win raises for millions of workers. Some went on to build unions in their workplaces. Today, the call could be “Fight for $30,” a number frequently cited by Amazon workers as the bare minimum they need to survive.
Initiatives also could set safety standards for workers, ban the contracting-out of Amazon delivery drivers, and restrict data center siting.
Another initiative idea involves taxing robots. This would replenish revenue that governments lose when Amazon swaps out humans — who pay payroll taxes and who also contribute to sales tax revenue when they spend money in the community — with robots, who do neither of those things. Initiatives could also require Amazon to pay into a publicly controlled affordable housing fund to offset the destruction of housing that warehouse expansion causes. Or they could require Amazon to pay for health clinics and air cleanup, to compensate for the pollution that is caused by the daily movement of Amazon trucks and train cars.
These and other initiative ideas disrupt Amazon’s business model of exploitation and can be powerful mechanisms for drawing workers and community members together in common cause and in the ultimate demand for union recognition and contracts.
In some cases, ventures that challenge Amazon’s business model can be run as legislative campaigns instead of initiatives. In New York City, a coalition of union members and community activists is pressing City Council to pass the Delivery Protection Act, which would require Amazon to hire drivers directly and improve safety standards. That’s a good start. Now imagine Delivery Protection Act campaigns being waged simultaneously in 20 cities
Unions also should exploit frustration that third-party vendors and sellers have with Amazon. Individuals and small businesses trying to sell their products on the Amazon platform find their margins squeezed by the behemoth. Some companies have accused Amazon of stealing their ideas and then launching competitor products. Vendors like the DSPs are continually on tenterhooks, their contracts with Amazon subject to cancellation with almost no notice. A creative Amazon campaign can find common cause with these unlikely forces by launching local and state fights to rein in the behemoth’s power against individual sellers and small businesses.
Amazon “has a corporate dynamism and infrastructural flexibility unmatched by any other contemporary company,” the report notes. “But sheer size and wealth does not make it invincible. Indeed, the speed and complexity of Amazon’s supply chain make it a vulnerable organizing target as well as a challenging one. A well-resourced and multi-dimensional campaign can secure union recognition and contracts at Amazon.”
What constitutes a “well-resourced” campaign? Unions currently spend in aggregate about $10 million a year on Amazon organizing, with the lion’s share of that coming from the Teamsters. That is simply not enough to beat a company with 1,500 U.S. worksites and more than $120 billion cash on hand. To organize 80,000 workers in LA, or 100,000 on the east coast, or 50,000 in Florida, or the tens of thousands in other regions, I think we will need at least $100 million annually for at least a decade to fund thousands of organizers, both inside and outside Amazon facilities, along with a robust campaign infrastructure to build a new CIO-style industrial organizing movement.
That may seem like a lot of money, but consider that the U.S. labor movement assets today are around $35 billion, a 225 percent increase in the last 15 years, and that U.S. labor leaders spent more than $400 million on the failed Biden-Harris candidacy.
Collectively within labor, the resources are there to mount a serious Amazon campaign. Whether or not to take on the fight is a political choice.
This can’t be a fight taken on by just a handful of unions. It must be an all-in effort. Some 90 years ago, leaders in the United Mine Workers and other unions made a pact to organize workers in the auto, steel, electrical, and rubber industries, because they knew that without mass organizing, the entire working class was in jeopardy. This weekend, as AFL-CIO leaders meet in Minneapolis, unions stand at the same parlous crossroads. Let’s hope they make the right choice that their predecessors did 90 years ago.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Jonathan Rosenblum is a union organizer, member of the National Writers Union, and part-time Amazon delivery driver. He serves as Activist in Residence at the Center for Work and Democracy, Arizona State University.
Op-Ed: Maritime Cybersecurity is a Financial Investment
Saving hundreds of dollars now could cost billions of dollars later.
Over the last two months, the world has seen, in real time, the challenges and urgency of protecting maritime vessels from geopolitical threats. Since airstrikes began on Iran at the end of February, the Strait of Hormuz has become a focal point for maritime physical security. However, protection doesn’t end at physical safety for the vessel and its crew. We can’t forget that there’s another, more pervasive front to this war: the cyber front.
Iran and associated nation-states are highly skilled at cyberattacks. Over the last twelve years, the country has moved from a “second-tier” threat to one of the leading sponsors of geopolitical cyberattacks, blending state-sponsored espionage with the broader cybercrime ecosystem.
For example, in November 2025, a hacking group calling itself Imperial Kitten penetrated the network of a ship’s Automatic Identification System (AIS) with the goal of gaining access to critical shipping infrastructure. The hackers even gained access to closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras installed on a maritime vessel, which provided real-time visual intelligence.
Exploiting a vessel’s security vulnerabilities is shockingly easy due to insufficient security investment. Ignoring this threat poses a grave risk to both national security and financial stability.
The Financial Risk of Underfunded Security
Much of the focus on the Strait of Hormuz has been on the energy supply chain; however, the global shipping industry is essential for moving a wide range of goods, from automobile components to beer. If a cargo vessel is delayed for any reason, the entire supply chain can be disrupted. Trucking and warehousing schedules are pushed back. Quotas are missed. For a vessel stuck in port for mechanical or other reasons, the cost is estimated at up to $100,000 per day.
Today’s vessels run on sophisticated computer systems. These systems store sensitive information, such as cargo manifests, crew and guest passport information, navigational routes, terminal and port information, and more. These are exactly the kinds of sensitive data that experienced hackers want.
And yet, most ship owners’ security budgets are quite small, often only $300 to $1,000 a month. Compared to the cybersecurity budget of landlocked enterprises, this is woefully underfunded. As a result, security professionals are tasked with doing more with lean budgets. It’s tempting to cut corners when budgets are tight, but saving a few bucks on cybersecurity can turn out to be a devastating mistake in the long run.
This is not a hypothetical risk—it is a ticking financial time bomb.
Consider this: ship owners routinely spend between $175,000 and $3 million per month on fuel alone. Allocating just 1% of that single operational expense toward a robust cybersecurity strategy wouldn't just be a "budget line item"—it would be a comprehensive insurance policy for the vessel's data, crew safety, and corporate reputation. In an era of digital warfare, a 1% investment is a small price to pay to prevent a 100% loss.
The Connected Ship's Paradox and Modern Vulnerabilities
As tensions rise globally, most operators are focused on physical disruption, and with good reason. However, this ramped-up vigilance comes at the expense of exposed digital systems that threat actors are exploiting, especially now, when crews are stuck in the Strait of Hormuz with more time on their hands.
Ship crews with forced downtime are heavily relying on personal devices and unsecured ship networks. This surge in connectivity creates massive, exploitable blind spots, allowing attackers to directly compromise a vessel’s network, stored data, and broader business operations.
Connected vessels are a hacker's dream, yet ship owners continue to invest the bare minimum in security. This false economy leaves critical systems exposed to potential hostile takeover, risking a ship being run ashore or held hostage. When a ransomware attack cripples a vessel in port, the cost of saving a few hundred dollars on cybersecurity becomes an immediate, catastrophic corporate loss.
The Strategic Imperative: Viewing Security as an Investment
Long before the recent global tension, we were encouraging ship owners to bolster their cyber defenses amid a surge in potential threats. Since the war started, we’ve witnessed physical attacks on ships in the region. While direct cyberattacks have not yet been confirmed, ransomware, data leaks, social engineering hacks, and other digital disruptions are becoming increasingly inevitable. It is no longer a matter of if, but when.
The biggest challenge in maritime cybersecurity isn't the technology—it's the mindset. The industry must confront the reality that attempting to save $200 a month on security budgets could leave a shipping firm liable for billions in damages, poor stock performance, and reputational damage that will be difficult to overcome.
Many still see robust security as too expensive, making it difficult to convince stakeholders that these measures are a necessary investment against sophisticated hackers. Organizations need to view cybersecurity as a strategic investment rather than just an overhead expense.
Youri Hart is Vice President, Product and Solutions at Marlink.
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