Laredo’s AI automation agency.

Laredo is the leading land port of the United States. The Port of Laredo, the Laredo customs district built around the World Trade Bridge, was the number-one U.S. port by trade value in 2023 and again in 2024, ahead of the Port of Los Angeles and Chicago, moving roughly $339.7 billion in two-way trade in 2024 (about $211 billion of imports and $128.6 billion of exports), nearly all of it with Mexico. About 14,000 commercial trucks cross the Laredo bridges on a typical day, close to 40 percent of all US-Mexico overland trade through a single point.

That trade runs on logistics. Hundreds of motor carriers, licensed U.S. customs brokers, Mexican agentes aduanales across the river in Nuevo Laredo, freight forwarders, and 3PL operators clear, transload, and warehouse goods around the clock. Laredo-based firms such as Eduardo E. Lozano & Co. (EELCO) and national operators with large Laredo footprints like Crane Worldwide Logistics and AIT Worldwide line the Interstate 35 corridor with cross-dock, transload, and foreign-trade-zone capacity. Every one of those shipments carries CBP entry filings, USMCA rules-of-origin, ACE data, and C-TPAT supply-chain-security obligations.

Beyond the bridges, Laredo runs on public institutions and healthcare. United ISD and Laredo ISD are the two largest employers, followed by the City of Laredo, Webb County, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol workforce, H-E-B, Laredo Medical Center (326 beds), Doctors Hospital of Laredo (183 beds), and Texas A&M International University. TAMIU enrolls about 9,137 students, is a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and runs trade and border-economics research centers including the Texas Center for Border Economic and Enterprise Development that fit the city perfectly.

Laredo is one of the most heavily bilingual large cities in the United States, about 95 percent Hispanic, where Spanish and English operation is essential rather than optional. Customs-brokerage entry processing, carrier and dispatch coordination, warehouse and FTZ documentation, bilingual patient access, and back-office reconciliation are the manual workflows that consume the most staff hours here, and they are exactly where AI returns time fastest. Add Central Time alignment with Nuevo Laredo and Monterrey, and Laredo is one of the highest-leverage border metros to deploy production AI.