Amit Maheshwari, Founder and CEO, Softlink Global is candid about the limits of technology. When India’s customs backbone, ICEGATE, faces downtime, no private platform can substitute for it- filing, acknowledgements, duty processing and cargo release simply stall. What Softlink’s Live IMPEX platform can do is protect the forwarder’s work around that outage: keeping document preparation available, securely queuing transactions, retrying transmission once ICEGATE returns, matching response messages and preserving a full audit trail, backed by high-availability systems, disaster recovery and round-the-clock support.
TECHNOLOGY FIXES DATA GAPS, NOT INFRASTRUCTURE GAPS.
Software Versus Steel
That distinction between what software can and cannot fix runs through his broader view of India’s logistics costs, which the latest NCAER-DPIIT assessment places at roughly 7.97 percent of GDP. ERP systems, he argues, can strip out the inefficiency caused by repeated data entry, poor planning, document errors and weak shipment visibility- but they cannot clear a congested port, add rail capacity, or fix a poor road network. Software removes data delays; physical infrastructure removes movement delays. India needs both operating in tandem.
Rail’s Data Ceiling
On rail, Maheshwari sees genuine but bounded capability. Softlink’s Logi-Sys system can already manage rail as part of a multimodal shipment- bookings, documents, costs, milestones and customer visibility- with tracking supported through railway, terminal, ULIP, NLDS and partner data feeds. The ceiling, he cautions, is the quality of the underlying data itself; the platform should never promise real-time visibility that the network cannot actually deliver.
AI Without the Shortcuts
That same discipline shapes his approach to AI. Automation layered onto a weak process, he warns, simply makes existing inefficiency faster rather than fixing it. Softlink’s approach is to map the workflow, identify repeated exceptions and remove needless steps first, using AI afterward to flag unusual costs, missing documents and process gaps- with human approval and audit trails always retained. The test, in his words, is whether AI reduces errors and cycle time, not merely transaction speed.
