Seatrade Maritime: Bimco piloting ‘self-performing’ contracts with Hunit

Shipping association Bimco has launched a joint pilot project with AI-powered ‘agentic contracts’ company Hunit.

The partners said they aim to modernise the maritime industry with the new technology, cutting manual workloads and inefficiencies related to standard contracts. Work currently managed through email inboxes, pdfs, and spreadsheets are a barrier to the sector’s efficiency, they added, and the new technology will help to address growing operational workloads arising from sanctions regimes, safety and emissions reporting, insurer transparency expectations, and more frequent inspections.

Hunit’s self-performing contract platform will be integrated with Bimco’s library of standard maritime agreements. The pilot project will see Hunit’s technology turn standard contracts into ‘self-managing agents’.

Hunit pitches its agentic contracts as placing automation inside legal contracts, creating a new class of legal agreement and business automation. For its Bimco project, contracts will still be negotiated and agreed in Bimco’s SmartCon contract management platform. Once finalised, the contracts will be transformed into systems that execute their terms in the real world.

As an example of the technology’s application in shipping, the partners considered a vessel approaching a piracy corridor under Best Management Practice (BMP5) and due to undergo a Port State inspection at its next call; such a vessel cannot be sure that emails are being read in time or that co-ordination is working across timezones, they said.