At the 2026 GBEF EDGE Security Summit, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Assistant Commissioner Sanjeev “Sonny” Bhagowalia pulled back the curtain on how his team leverages AI, emerging technology and cross agency collaboration for border security and global commerce. In a fast-paced talk peppered with humor and hard numbers, he framed CBP as a “Fortune 10 level” operation that processes millions of people and trillions of dollars in trade annually while defending the nation against increasingly sophisticated adversaries. Here’s how.
Data Driven Trade Security At Scale
CBP’s trade mission involves staggering scale. More than 5.4 trillion dollars in imports and exports move through U.S. ports, airports and land borders each year, along with tens of millions of cargo shipments. Bhagowalia emphasized that advanced analytics and AI have become essential to spot fraud, track supply chain risk and protect economic security at that velocity.
He highlighted CBP’s advanced trade analytics platform, which embeds hundreds of agile development teams directly with agents, officers and analysts so technologists “sit with the mission in front.” That team has already analyzed approximately 137,000 merchandise entries across all four trade modalities (air, sea, land and rail freight) and seized $7.4 billion in intellectual property rights violations. Bhagowalia described how CBP uses harmonized tariff schedule analysis, AI assisted fraud detection, dashboarding with tools like QLIK and chatbot interfaces to help users explore underlying data and surface evasion patterns faster.
Land Border Integration: AI At The Physical Edge
When Bhagowalia shifted from economic prosperity to border security, he zeroed in on Land Border Integration (LBI) lanes. There, CBP treats physical border crossings as an Internet of Things (IoT) edge environment. A single day now sees over 270,000 privately owned vehicles ingesting through Southwest border LBI lanes that are instrumented with integrated sensing technologies.
AI and machine learning models in this LBI environment have already contributed to 110,000 pounds of narcotics seizures in fiscal year 2025 alone, as a subset of CBP’s larger drug interdiction efforts. Bhagowalia stressed that edge AI provides real time, actionable intelligence to Border Patrol and CBP officers so they can focus on judgment and training. “AI is the assist, the human is in charge,” he said when explaining CPB’s policy of human primacy in operational decision making.
He also described a near term future in which edge processing, computer vision, voice interfaces and hands free systems will continuously infer risk and “talk to the agent,” pointing them to what matters most in the inspection lane. That edge architecture spans hardwired fixed infrastructure, human mobility edge on vehicles and airframes, dismounted officers carrying devices and a wide array of sensors, cameras and wearables across 7,575 miles of border and hundreds of ports and stations.
Traveler Verification System: Biometrics At Billion Scale
On the national security side, Bhagowalia spotlighted the AI-enabled Traveler Verification System (TVS) that supports biometric entry and exit in air, land and sea environments under congressional mandates. TVS currently processes about 1,180,000 passengers and pedestrians every day. It reviewed 328 million travelers moved through Simplified Arrival pathways in just in fiscal year 2025.
CBP expects TVS to reach a significant milestone by the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026. Current match rates sit at roughly 98.7 percent, even with a back end adjudication time of only 0.3 seconds within a two second service level agreement. Bhagowalia said with TVS, “the face is your passport” for fast, accurate identity verification. Its algorithms can cut through deceptive tactics, including cosmetic attempts to evade identification, to protect travelers and officers in real time. He noted that TVS has already identified over 2,307 imposters attempting to cross US borders, including an internationally wanted individual tied to child pornography and sexual assault.
TVS also anchors CBP’s modernization of Global Entry, where advanced capture technology will increasingly support “continuous traveler flow” at ports such as Dubai, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Miami, Houston, Philadelphia, Newark, JFK and San Francisco. Bhagowalia described a traveler experience where people “keep on walking through” while CBP matches faces to biographic and health holdings, including checks for Ebola and other public health risks in collaboration with Health and Human Services.
Past, Present And Future: AI, Quantum And Edge
Bhagowalia described CBP’s technology journey as building on the past, improving the present and positioning for the future, with each phase marked by distinct toolsets.
Under “Build Upon the Past,” CBP continues to expand predictive analytics, algorithms and robotic process automation as foundational capabilities.
In the present, CBP is rolling out generative AI, including an internal “chatCBP” concept and AI code assist tools that have already delivered a fully AI generated software application with humans in the loop for validation. That early work saved approximately 77,000 developer hours and about five million dollars in cost avoidance while handling millions of user requests and thousands of lines of code through a secure CI/CD and AI MLOps pipeline.
Looking ahead, CBP is preparing for a different class of threat. Bhagowalia described how his team, led by quantum and infrastructure experts, continues to explore quantum computing and sensing to optimize operations and harden communications, while standing up post quantum cryptography so future quantum computers cannot crack today’s encrypted data. He warned that a “Q day” event, where adversaries who “harvest now, decrypt later” finally gain the power to unlock stolen ciphertext, is sliding left from the 2030 time frame. CBP has already run proofs of concept with NIST-approved algorithms and is now wrapping high value applications and network links with quantum resistant protections.
Bhagowalia also pointed to pilots that pair those cryptographic defenses with resilient low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications on FirstNet to give agents secure voice and data connectivity direct to mobile devices in highly remote terrain where traditional networks fail. For CBP, quantum readiness and space based connectivity are part of a broader cyber strategy that treats encryption, networks and mission systems as a single fabric that must survive both AI-driven attacks and future quantum breakthroughs.
Cloud Smart, Zero Trust And AI Versus AI
A full scale cloud migration and cyber modernization push underlies CBP’s AI and edge ambitions. Bhagowalia said CBP remains on track to move 276 of its applications fully into the cloud and away from a tier four data center by January 2028. This will enable faster, more affordable and more secure deployment.
On the cyber side, he identified four priority areas: zero trust architecture, post quantum cryptography, countermeasures against AI-generated attacks and next generation identity management. In his words, zero trust means “never trust, always verify,” even for traffic from .gov addresses, backed by department wide tools that the DHS CIO has adopted to harden the perimeter.
Bhagowalia cautioned that CBP now sees between 150 and 160 million cyberattack attempts each day, up from about 100 million in recent years. AI-generated threats comprise a growing share of these. He argued that agencies must deploy AI defensive tools against AI offensive techniques while keeping humans in the loop, and invites industry to bring forward practical use cases that can help CBP secure its expanding attack surface.
Cross Agency Collaboration As A Security Imperative
The final message of Bhagowalia’s EDGE presentation focused on cross agency and cross sector collaboration. He described policy directives that emphasize information sharing across national, border, economic and cyber security domains, with the simple guidance to “share first” rather than hesitate behind silos.
Drawing on his experience at the FBI during 9/11 and major counterintelligence cases, Bhagowalia argued that failure to share data is unacceptable in today’s environment. CBP now operates trusted partner initiatives across about twenty internal offices, multiple DHS components such as Secret Service, TSA and ICE, as well as ten government agencies, thousands of suppliers, airlines, cargo entities and partners in roughly 98 countries.
He noted that CBP’s collaborative posture aligns with the kind of integrated ecosystem thinking championed by the Government Business Executive Forum (GBEF) and its EDGE events, where autonomy, AI, quantum, cyber and logistics converge. For Bhagowalia, the day to day reality of CBP’s 24 by seven mission to “deliver secure, reliable IT services and capabilities to authorized users anywhere, anytime, for any mission, on any approved device,” represents that convergence.
Human-Centered AI At The Border
Throughout his talk, Bhagowalia returned to one core message. Whether at a land border lane, a biometric gate or a cloud pipeline, AI exists to assist. People remain in charge. He envisions CBP’s future as faster, better, more affordable and more secure, powered by generative and agentic AI, edge computing, biometrics, quantum ready cryptography and relentless collaboration, all grounded in human judgment and public trust. For security leaders watching AI impact national, border and economic security, CBP’s roadmap offers a concrete example of how to scale automation without ceding control, how to harness emerging tech without “chasing shiny objects” and how to build cross agency collaboration into the fabric of daily operations.