Splash247: Maritime AI enters the payback era

Published by Splash247

Maritime technology vendors are facing a tougher test as shipowners and charterers move beyond experimentation and demand hard evidence that artificial intelligence can improve voyage earnings, cut fuel bills or reduce operating costs.

Interest is not the problem. Lloyd’s Register says 420 organisations were active in maritime AI development over the past year, up from 276 a year earlier. Yet a Thetius study produced with Marcura found that while 81% of maritime companies were running AI pilots, only 11% had formal policies in place to guide scaling.

That gap between experimentation and deployment is reshaping the market. Technology buyers increasingly want defined baselines, transparent benefit calculations and credible payback periods before committing to fleetwide rollouts.

Fuel optimisation remains one of the easiest use cases to measure. Cargill says nearly all its time-chartered ships now use ZeroNorth voyage optimisation software, which has cut fuel consumption, lowered costs and helped vessels maintain schedules.

By pairing advanced digital routing with our maritime expertise, we’re reducing emissions, saving fuel and making ocean transport more resilient,” said Eric Aboussouan, Cargill Ocean Transportation’s vice-president of strategy and digitalisation.

Navigation technology is also being sold on measurable savings. In a vendor case study, Orca AI said Seaspan vessels using its platform reduced fuel costs by about $100,000 per ship annually through fewer collision-avoidance manoeuvres and navigational deviations. The claim demonstrates the type of evidence owners now expect, although buyers are increasingly likely to scrutinise whether savings have been independently verified and can be reproduced across different vessel types and trades.

At Geneva Dry in April, Daniel Weiss, general manager of shipping strategy at Vale, highlighted a recurring problem with maritime technology pitches.

“It’s a solution looking for a problem, not the other way around,” Weiss said of some products brought to market before a clear operational need had been established.

Ingrid Kylstad, managing director of Klaveness Digital, said technology purchasing was still too often shaped by departmental budgets rather than wider commercial value.

“The conversation can quickly become about cost lines instead of outcomes,” she told Splash ahead of Geneva Dry.

Kylstad cited a customer that moved from high double-digit demurrage levels to single digits after digitalising its workflows over two years. The example also underlines a difficult message for vendors: meaningful returns may be substantial, but they are rarely instantaneous.

Captain Ali Ihtiyaroglu, managing partner of VTS Shipping, said the largest operators were already changing their approach.

“Larger operators have made the connection between data investment and margin, they’re committing capital and seeing returns,” he told Splash. VTS said it delivered $4.6m in verified bunker savings to clients in 2025, with recoveries documented operation by operation.

Scaling remains the harder part. Lloyd’s Register’s latest Digital Maturity Index placed shipping’s overall digital maturity at 2.1 out of four, with data standardisation at 2.45. Operational information is still frequently entered manually or stored in isolated systems, weakening the inputs used by AI models and complicating efforts to verify results.

Integration costs can also destroy an otherwise credible business case. A platform may perform well during a controlled trial but fail commercially if crews must duplicate data entry, shore teams inherit another dashboard or savings cannot be separated from weather, market conditions and human decisions.

The result is a market moving rapidly from promises to proof. Vendors selling voyage optimisation, predictive maintenance, digital twins or smart-ship platforms must increasingly connect their products to fuel invoices, avoided off-hire, improved time charter equivalent earnings, lower demurrage or fewer staff hours.

Shipping has not lost interest in AI. It has simply reached the stage where innovation must pay its way.