Splash247: Is maritime neglecting AI?

Published by Splash247

Olga Boenigk, the founder of AI goes Maritime, has a different take on the whole shipping and artificial intelligence debate.

We’re an industry that’s proud of being careful. We take our time. We wait to see what works before we touch it, and most of the time that has served us well. I’d defend it in a lot of things.

But careful only works when the ground stays still. And it isn’t standing still. Ask around shipping about AI right now and you’ll get one of two reactions. A polite brush-off, or a slightly panicked silence while someone works out what they’re meant to say about it. Almost nobody says what they actually think, because almost nobody is sure what to think.

Meanwhile, look at what’s happening to the big enterprise systems. The ones everybody bought because nobody ever got sacked for buying them. Talk to the people using them now and you hear the same story everywhere: teams building their own workarounds, quietly, because what they’re paying for can’t do what they need it to. And the vendors are working out that they can’t just bolt AI onto what they’ve already built. They have to think again from the ground up.

That realisation is arriving late. The small players smelled this a long time ago. No legacy to protect, no twenty-year roadmap, nothing to migrate. They just build.

So the Goliaths are losing ground to the Davids, and not because they’re badly run. Because they’re huge. Huge is slow. And slow is expensive right now.

The same thing is happening to people, and this is where it gets uncomfortable. The worry I hear most often is about the young ones. If I bring AI in, am I putting the next generation out of a job? That worry is not imaginary. Look at what a junior assistant actually spends their week doing and a fair amount of it is exactly what these tools are good at. You can see it in the market already, and anyone telling you otherwise isn’t looking properly.

But there’s a second thing going on at the same time, and hardly anyone puts the two together. While we’re all worrying about the young ones, a whole group at the other end is quietly deciding this isn’t for them. Too old for it. Too senior for it. Too whatever for it. Nobody is making those people redundant. They’re doing it to themselves, on a delay, and they won’t notice until it’s finished.
So: squeeze from the bottom, squeeze from the top. Cut the new generation and lose the old one, and what exactly are we left with?

That’s not a clever line, it’s a manning problem. We already can’t find enough qualified people. We’ve been saying so at every conference for a decade. Neither end of this is something we can afford to give away.

And the chances here are equal, which is the part people miss. If you can work a smartphone and a laptop, you can work AI. Most people already do, at home, on their own phones, without telling anyone at work. What they can’t do yet is turn that into something useful in a business, safely and legally. That’s a different skill, and almost nobody is teaching it.

Which is also why there’s so little help available. This field is too young to have produced many real experts. Fewer of them understand shipping. Fewer again think about the people in it rather than the systems. So you’ve got an industry full of sensible people who want a straight answer, and a market full of consultants who all know your business better than you do.
No wonder everyone’s gone quiet.

But quiet isn’t neutral. While we’re waiting for someone trustworthy to explain it, other people are doing it badly, learning, and doing it less badly next month. That’s the whole advantage. There’s no genius involved. They started.

What would help isn’t another strategy paper. It’s people in this industry saying honestly what they’ve tried, including the things that flopped. One person saying “we tested this for a fortnight, it was useless, here’s why” is worth more than a year of panels.
Is maritime neglecting AI? I don’t think we’re neglecting it. I think we’ve gone silent in front of it, which looks almost the same from the outside and is a lot more forgivable.

It won’t stay forgivable for long.