Ramps, Angostura awarded at Energy Conference

RAMPS LOGISTICS and Angostura were among those recognised at an award ceremony during the three-day Energy Conference at the Hyatt Regency in Port of Spain on February 11.

Ramps Logistics won the innovation in technology challenge for the development of Mawi, a generative AI solution for customs brokerage.

Ramps was among five finalists which included Rum and Sargassum which used sargassum-based biofuel for sustainable low-carbon transportation in the Caribbean; Neptune Biosystems which looked at artificial hydroelectric power generation; TOSL Engineering which used low carbon cooling systems to promote energy efficiency; and 3BA Allmanda Enterprise which utilised a solar-thermal-powered dirt battery for power generation and storage.

Angostura won the excellence in corporate governance award, edging TOSL Engineering Services for the win.

MIC Centre for Renewable Energy and Associated Technologies won the award for best social investment project for its programme on apprenticeship training for the German Master Craftsman qualification.

The UN Development Programme’s Global Climate Change Alliance Plus (GCCA+) won the award for best decarbonisation project and CSA Ocean Sciences got the nod for excellence in safety.

CEO Shaun Rampersad said Ramps has been working with Mawi for two years and has trained the programme to extract data and make complicated decisions and classifications to streamline the customs process.

“In TT what our customs professionals do is they classify goods according to the harmonised tariffs to determine what licences and duties are required. What Mawi does, you can take one invoice with 100 items and it extracts every item, runs automated Google searches in the background in milliseconds, looks at the entire global database of that exists from those products, classifies it according to the correct codes and duty rates and puts it all together to submit to the Ascyuda system.

“Things that used to take ten hours with errors are now being done in seconds. It is the power of AI.”

He said the programme was not only designed and trained to handle customs in TT but in the US. He said Ramps has plans to scale up the programme especially since policies imposed by the US president Donald Trump are presenting new opportunities.

“President Trump has removed something called 'de minimis' values. If you brought in a shipment from China and it was less than US$800 you didn’t have to do a customs entry before. Now they have to do it. So all of a sudden the US is going to be doing hundreds of thousands of customs entries.

“Hopefully there will be a solution that could do that for them,” he said.

He said the Mawi system is an important example of how people in the Caribbean can use technology to innovate.

“Just like we created a world-class energy industry, there is an opportunity to create a world-class AI technology industry.”