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.