Digital Market Report 2026
TECHNOLOGY • INNOVATION • IMPACT
CONTENTS
Many new tools are adding complexity rather than capability Manish Singh
Maris Investments
THE LINEUP 3
Editor’s Comment
5
Introduction
11
Digital ROI
15
Consolidation
19
Digital Standards
23
Inmarsat Maritime Special
31
Data Ownership
34
Legacy Mindsets
37
Seafarer Skillsets
40
Scale Barriers
42
Opinion
AI makes it incredibly easy to stand up a piece of software and slap a ‘powered by AI’ badge on it and start selling
7
5
Janani Yagnamurthy
SVP at Marcura
The conversation can quickly become about cost lines instead of outcomes Ingrid Kylstad
Managing director of Klaveness Digital
The industry needs fewer silos, not bigger silos
11
Hrvoje Mihovilović
Founder and chief executive ELNAV.AI
15
Most of us are probably still trying to figure out how we’re going to deploy AI and not yet worried about the governance of AI Scott Bergeron
Oldendorff Carriers
19
There is an important distinction between outsourcing complexity and outsourcing control Ben Palmer
President Viasat Commercial
Stay up to date with all the latest Splash news via our new app
23
An owner can sit on terabytes and still be locked out, paying for the privilege of reading their own information Jamie Jones
Download for Apple and Android
Managing director GTMaritime
31
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EDITOR’S COMMENT Digital Market Report 2026
SPLASHTECH The site for incisive, exclusive maritime news and views
www.splash247.com
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Sam Chambers sam@splashmaritimegroup.com SENIOR CORRESPONDENT Adis Adjin adis@splashmaritimegroup.com CORRESPONDENT Bojan Lepic bojan@splashmaritimegroup.com All editorial material should be sent to sam@splashmaritimegroup.com COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR Grant Rowles grant@splashmaritimegroup.com GENERAL MANAGER Victor Halder victor@splashmaritimegroup.com MEDIA KITS ARE AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD AT WWW.SPLASH247.COM/ADVERTISING All commercial material should be sent to grant@splashmaritimegroup.com or mailed to Splash Maritime Group Pte Ltd 36 Robinson Road, #20-01, City House Singapore 068877 DESIGN Belinda Printed in Hong Kong
Copyright © Splash Maritime Group Pte Ltd, 2026 Although every effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this review is correct, the publishers accept no liability for any inaccuracies or omissions that may occur. All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the copyright owner. For reprints of specific articles contact grant@splashmaritimegroup.com
Four questions to ask before signing another tech contract
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fter wading through tens of thousands of words from maritime technology leaders for this magazine, one conclusion stands out: shipowners do not need to become technology experts. They need to become better technology buyers.
What exactly will this save me? Not “up to 5%”. Not “greater efficiency”. Demand a baseline, measurable KPIs and a date by which value should become visible. The strongest vendors increasingly accept this themselves. Savings also extend beyond fuel. Offhire avoided, crew hours returned, fewer systems, maintenance interventions prevented and reduced compliance work all count.
Will it work with what I already have? Every vendor’s product works beautifully in its own demonstration. Your vessel is different. Mixed-age fleets contain decades of machinery, software and communications technology. Ask what the new application connects to, what integration costs, how long it takes and whether standard APIs are available. Better still, ask what happens when you replace the vendor. If extracting your own data requires a six-month project, you have not bought software. You have acquired a dependency.
The operational data generated by a vessel should remain under the owner’s control, with explicit rules covering access, purpose, duration and secondary use. Sharing needs clearly defined permissions; ownership should not mean secrecy. With AI, also ask is my data training your product for somebody else?
Do you actually understand ships? Shipping is attracting brilliant software engineers who have never dealt with a fouled hull, drifting sensor, intermittent connection or de-rated engine. Generic AI presented with bad maritime context can produce confident nonsense. Ask who inside the vendor has actually operated ships, worked with crews and understands what happens when the elegant digital model collides with the messy physical world. Technology should remove complexity, not introduce another invoice, another silo and another problem for the superintendent to solve. That is the fifth question hiding beneath the first four: does this genuinely make running ships easier?
Who owns my data? This ought to be settled before the first byte leaves the ship.
Sam Chambers Editor Splash
If it sounds too good to be true, look at the baseline. If it still looks good, look at the methodology. If it still looks good, then we may have something to think about. If not, look for the * www.splash247.com 3
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INTRODUCTION
AI wins the vote, but the plumbing decides AI will only transform shipping once data, context, connectivity and fragmented workflows are finally brought together
I
f one answer dominates SplashTech’s survey of maritime technology leaders, it is artificial intelligence. The more revealing finding is how few respondents are willing to leave the answer there. AI is expected to touch almost every part of shipping over the next five years: voyage planning, maintenance, procurement, cargo operations, compliance, safety, commercial decisions and the daily administration that consumes extraordinary amounts of time at sea and ashore. Yet contributor after contributor adds the same qualification. Intelligence is only as good as the data, context, connectivity, architecture and maritime knowledge underneath it. Matthew Talbot, co-CEO of Complexio, offers one of the clearest versions of that argument. His choice for the most transformative technology is the ability to read shipping’s unstructured coordination layer — email, chat, documents and attachments — and turn it into a governed model of how a company actually operates. “The word that matters there is
context,” Talbot tells SplashTech. Any general-purpose model can summarise an email, he argues. The harder problem is understanding what that message means inside a particular shipping company: which vessel, cargo, counterparty, person and previous decision it connects to and how the work really flows. Shipping’s operational record often sits in the inbox rather than the ERP. Until machines can read that history intelligently, applications above it work from only part of the picture. Manish Singh of Maris Investments comes at the same problem from a different direction. Asked to identify the single most transformative digital technology, he declines to name a technology at all. His choice is “the platform of record that removes the silos we have in maritime workflow”. “Until that happens, many new tools are adding complexity rather than capability,” Singh says. Together, the answers point towards the larger contest taking shape. Shipping does not lack applications. It lacks
the connective tissue allowing its applications, communications, data and people to behave as one operation.
AI, but with conditions Gert-Jan Panken, general manager and vice-president at Inmarsat Maritime, expects AI to have the broadest impact, but says its value depends entirely on the quality of the inputs and digital foundations supporting it. AI needs reliable data and secure ship-shore integration before it can improve maintenance, voyage optimisation, safety, emissions performance and commercial efficiency. Without that foundation, it risks becoming another layer of complexity. Nico Lehtinen, director of digital transformation at Elomatic, also nominates AI while stressing that shipping has only scratched the surface. The technology will gradually become a natural extension of engineering and operational management rather than something users visit as a separate application.
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INTRODUCTION
The winners are unlikely to be the companies with the most visible chatbot. They will be those that embed intelligence quietly into workflows where decisions are already being made. Maayan Castel, vice-president of product at Agwa, describes the opportunity as “domain-specific AI that closes the loop between sensing, decision and action”. “Maritime does not need more dashboards displaying data that someone must interpret,” she says. Janani Yagnamurthy, senior vicepresident for product and strategic growth at Marcura, focuses on another major opportunity: AI agents capable of institutionalising organisational knowledge. As experienced professionals retire, companies able to capture decades of commercial decisions, working practices and contract interpretation will possess an advantage that cannot easily be bought back later. Talbot makes a similar point. Shipping still treats much operational knowledge as personal property: the superintendent who remembers why machinery was changed early, or the operator who knows which agent gets things done in a particular port. When that person leaves, the company often pays to learn the lesson again.
The common thread is not simply smarter software. It is shortening the distance between knowledge and action.
The plumbing comes first Joy Basu, chief executive of Smart Ship Hub, provides perhaps the survey’s most deliberately unfashionable answer. If forced to choose the genuinely transformative technology, he picks the onboard data logger. Shipping still relies heavily on AIS, noon reports and fragmented onboard systems. If high-frequency information from engines, boilers, flow meters, shaftpower meters, navigation equipment and cargo systems can be collected cheaply and reliably, the industry suddenly has the raw material required for AI, digital twins, automated reporting and predictive maintenance. “An AI model that has never accounted for a fouled hull, a de-rated engine or a fabricated AIS position will give you confident nonsense,” Basu says. Generic AI is advancing extraordinarily quickly, but ships are not generic environments. Sensors drift. Machinery degrades. Connectivity disappears. Hulls foul. Crews improvise. Weather changes. Commercial priorities conflict. Talbot broadens the argument beyond
telemetry. A sensor record may tell an operator that a pump ran hot. Combine that signal with the superintendent’s emails, previous attendance reports and what the crew actually did and a machine can begin to understand why. Structured data and human context become more valuable together than either is separately. David Evans, chief technology officer at Idwal, therefore argues that transformation starts with verified operational data and standardised reporting, with AI and analytics sitting above them. Adam Dennett, chief executive of SpecTec, similarly picks standardised, interoperable data as the foundation determining who actually benefits from artifcial intelligence. AI may finally provide the commercial reason for fixing digital problems shipping has tolerated for years. Not everybody accepts that artificial intelligence itself deserves top billing. Bjørn Kristian, director at NAVTOR, picks S-100, the next-generation maritime data framework bringing navigation products including electronic charts, bathymetry, water levels and surface currents under a common structure. “S-100 introduces richer, dynamic and interoperable navigation layers,” Kristian says, with the potential to improve
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By using Complexio, I managed within minutes to have a full picture of our whole exposure. Something that would have taken our team probably a week or two.” Alex Albertini CEO, Marfin Management S.A.M. Complexio automatically builds a connected understanding of your business across systems, documents and communication , giving you the context to see what matters and act on it faster.
Systems ERP, CRM, databases
Documents Contracts, reports, spreadsheets
Email Threads, approvals, attachments
Chat Messaging platforms
Files Shared drives and folders
complexio.com
INTRODUCTION
situational awareness, route monitoring and voyage planning. His answer is useful precisely because it reinforces the broader survey result. Much of the next generation of maritime intelligence depends upon richer information becoming structured and interoperable before clever applications can make use of it. Technology below the surface may ultimately determine what the headline technology can achieve.
From applications to an operating layer This is where Singh’s platform-of-record argument becomes especially important. Maritime technology has traditionally been bought department by department and problem by problem. Crewing gets one system, technical another, chartering another, procurement another and performance another. Humans then become the integration layer, moving information between products through spreadsheets, emails, rekeying and memory. Singh believes that architecture is nearing the end of its useful life. His destination is a common operating record for the vessel and the people around it, allowing different functions to converge on the same underlying information. “Segments are how vendors organise
themselves,” he says. “Operators do not experience segments. They experience one workflow that crosses multiple platforms and applications.” Talbot’s emphasis on correspondence explains why solving only the application layer is insufficient. Every downstream system needs to know what happened, who decided it and on what basis. Much of that evidence remains embedded in conversations and attachments rather than databases. Christoffer Svard, chief commercial officer at Sea, expects AI agents increasingly to connect directly with other systems rather than forcing people continually to log into separate platforms. Software becomes part of a workflow ecosystem rather than a destination. Kris Vedat, chief executive of SmartSea, reaches a comparable conclusion from the fleet side. He expects autonomous decision ecosystems to connect vessels, shore teams and maritime infrastructure. The breakthrough is not automating individual tasks but allowing fleets to behave as connected operational networks.
Human judgement stays in the loop For all the enthusiasm around agents and automation, relatively few respondents envisage the next five years as a march
towards people-free shipping. Mikko Kuosa, chief executive of NAPA, argues that AI should propose while humans decide. Garry Noonan, director of innovation at Ardmore Shipping, likewise stresses that technology delivers its greatest value when it enhances human decision-making rather than replaces it. Talbot raises another threshold: can the output be defended afterwards? A decision may be challenged months later by an owner, charterer, surveyor, insurer or tribunal. Accuracy alone is insufficient. The system needs to preserve where information came from, which version was used and the reasoning chain behind the recommendation. That may prove one of the distinctions between maritime AI products that graduate from demonstrations and those that do not. Five years from now, AI will almost certainly be embedded far more deeply in shipping. But SplashTech’s survey suggests the bigger transformation may be what the AI boom forces the industry to fix around it: data quality, context, interoperability, connectivity, identity, institutional knowledge and workflow. The breakthrough will not come when every ship gets an AI assistant. It will come when the ship, shore office and technology stack finally start working from the same operational reality — and can show how they got there.
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TURN UNCERTAINTY
INTO CONFIDENCE
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DIGITAL ROI
Show me the savings Shipping has never been famous for opening its wallet on a promise. Digital technology is no exception. Fuel remains the easiest return to prove, but the industry’s real technology dividend increasingly lies in avoided downtime, reduced administration, stronger compliance, better decisions and assets that simply perform better
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hipping likes innovation considerably more when somebody can put a dollar sign next to it. The industry will spend $100m on a vessel because the asset, financing structure, earning assumptions and residual value can be modelled. Ask the same owner for a comparatively modest sum for software promising better decisions, fewer mistakes or improved visibility and the interrogation can become considerably more forensic. There is nothing irrational about this. Shipping is cyclical, margins can disappear quickly and technology vendors have spent years promising transformations that proved difficult to measure. Owners have learned to distinguish between an impressive demonstration and a bankable return. Fuel savings therefore dominate the digital business case because they are unusually legible. Burn 20 tonnes instead of 21 and somebody can calculate the saving before lunch. The problem, SplashTech’s contributors argue, is that this narrow definition increasingly understates what successful digitalisation is worth.
Gert-Jan Panken, general manager and vice-president at Inmarsat Maritime, says digital ROI should encompass vessel uptime, off-hire, maintenance efficiency, onboard interventions, safety, cyber resilience, regulatory readiness and the speed and quality of decisionmaking. Crew experience belongs in the calculation too: connectivity that improves welfare, training, medical access and retention carries a commercial value even if it never appears on the bunker statement. There is also what Panken calls the cost of complexity. If one platform removes several systems, contracts and support relationships, the saving is real even though it may be distributed across budgets and therefore invisible to a conventional ROI calculation. That gets to the central difficulty. Digitalisation rarely saves money in only one place.
The easy number wins Nico Lehtinen, director of digital transformation at Elomatic, argues that owners need to look beyond fuel towards
engineering productivity, maintenance planning, operational efficiency, safety, crew wellbeing and decision quality. Digital investments should reduce costs, but they should also create additional business value. The challenge is turning those benefits into numbers that survive an investment committee. An avoided machinery failure has no invoice. Neither does a casualty that never happens, a port state control delay avoided through better records or a superintendent who identifies a problem two weeks earlier because the right information reaches shore. Yet any one of those outcomes can dwarf the annual subscription cost of the software involved. Joy Basu, chief executive of Smart Ship Hub, argues that fuel dominates because it is the easiest saving to measure rather than because it is necessarily the most valuable. His broader calculation includes crew hours returned through automation, compliance work removed, downtime avoided through predictive maintenance, safety incidents prevented, schedule
Vendor claims of percentage savings invite scepticism www.splash247.com 11
DIGITAL ROI
reliability, insurance benefits and the preservation of asset value through a better documented operating history. Smart Ship Hub sees automated reporting returning up to 70% of the time crews spend compiling noon reports, Basu says. Man-hours are rarely treated like bunker tonnes because salaries have already been budgeted, but that does not make those hours free. This is one of maritime digitalisation’s great accounting blind spots. Manual work often escapes scrutiny because its cost is buried inside existing headcount. A new application appears as a fresh expense; the 20-year-old process consuming hundreds of employee hours appears to cost nothing. The comparison is obviously false. Some of the largest returns from technology are preventive. Predictive maintenance is a straightforward example. The value is not the alarm itself but the chain of consequences the alarm interrupts: machinery damage, emergency spares, unplanned attendance, off-hire, schedule disruption and potentially a lost chartering opportunity. Safety presents an even harder calculation. Technology that improves situational awareness, identifies a developing machinery problem or gives crews better access to procedures may prevent an incident whose precise probability can never be known. Henning Davies, chief executive of LedgID, points to reduced administrative effort, faster processes and improved retention as forms of return that frequently disappear from narrow technology assessments. The economic impact of wasting a senior officer’s time is especially easy to overlook because the
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organisation sees the salary but not the opportunity cost. Vikas Pandey, chief executive of Shipfinex, pushes the calculation further into the balance sheet. Better digital records can potentially influence financing, due diligence, charterparty disputes, asset transparency and ultimately the value investors place on a vessel. That matters as the industry gradually creates richer digital histories of its ships. Two nominally identical 15-yearold vessels need not represent identical risks if one has a continuous record of machinery performance, maintenance, fuel consumption, incidents and operating practices while the other comes with scattered spreadsheets and paper records. Digitalisation can therefore become part of the asset itself. The return may emerge at refinancing, sale, insurance renewal or chartering rather than in the month the software invoice is paid.
skilled at counting users, data points, dashboards and alerts. None is necessarily a commercial outcome. P K Mishra, managing director of IRClass, similarly argues that the industry needs to measure technology through operational outcomes rather than digital activity. Faster analysis, fewer manual interventions and better reliability matter because of what they change onboard and ashore. This also makes ROI highly specific to the operator. A performance platform may produce enormous value for a fuel-intensive fleet trading long ocean legs while delivering less for another operation. Automated documentation could be transformative for a company overwhelmed by reporting requirements but marginal for one that has already streamlined the process internally. There is no universal percentage that proves digitalisation works. The baseline matters. So does the problem being solved.
Decision quality has a value
From emissions to economics
Another difficult return is simply making fewer bad decisions. Gry Sørås, head of branding and sustainability at Siglar, argues that digital ROI should be judged through business impact: compliance exposure, chartering outcomes, administrative workload and the quality of decisions made using the information available. A technology system, she says, does not create value because people log into it. It creates value when a different decision follows. That distinction is crucial. The maritime tech industry has become
When SplashTech asks which digital tool delivers the highest return on emissions reduction, the responses become much more concentrated. Voyage optimisation, weather routing, trim and speed optimisation, hull and engine performance monitoring repeatedly rise to the top. The attraction is obvious. These technologies attack emissions through operational changes rather than expensive physical modifications. Better routing can avoid adverse conditions. Better speed decisions reduce unnecessary consumption.
DIGITAL ROI
Fuel is the easiest saving to measure, which is why it dominates the conversation and why it undersells the real return Hull monitoring identifies performance deterioration. Trim optimisation helps extract more from machinery and hull forms already installed. Basu argues that fuel efficiency and emissions reduction are essentially the same operational problem viewed through different lenses. The most useful system is the one that continuously closes the gap between how a vessel is performing and how it could be performing. The gains can look almost trivial at the level of an individual decision. A marginally different speed, earlier hull cleaning or altered route rarely makes headlines. Applied repeatedly across dozens of ships and hundreds of voyages, however, small corrections compound. “The sensor layer beneath it is not a detail; it is the whole game,” Basu says, stressing that optimisation cannot outperform poor information. Gry Sørås makes a related point. The highest-return tool is ultimately the one that changes behaviour consistently. Whether labelled voyage planning, weather routing, emissions analytics or fuel optimisation matters less than whether the information reaches the person able to make a better operational choice. A recommendation ignored has zero ROI.
The optimisation stack The most effective emissions technology is therefore increasingly a stack rather than a single application. At the bottom sits reliable measurement: fuel flow, shaft power, engine condition, speed, draft, weather and other high-frequency operational inputs. Above that comes normalisation and analysis. Then comes the decision
layer: routing, speed, trim, maintenance or operational intervention. Finally comes verification: did consumption actually improve? Pankaj Sharma, chief executive of OneLink Performance, sees value in connecting those layers rather than treating individual optimisation products as isolated tools. Hull and machinery performance, voyage decisions and operational KPIs become more powerful when interpreted together. Petter Andersen, vice-president at StormGeo, similarly works in a field where the return depends on combining weather intelligence with vessel-specific performance. The shortest route is not necessarily the most economical, and the most economical voyage cannot be determined from weather or vessel data in isolation. That is why simplistic vendor claims of percentage savings invite scepticism. The achievable return depends on ship type, speed, route, weather, hull condition, existing operating discipline and the quality of the baseline. A badly operated vessel has more lowhanging fruit than an already optimised one. This creates a paradox for successful technology suppliers: the better their system works over time, the harder each additional percentage point becomes to find.
Pay for outcomes Owners’ suspicion of vague ROI claims is also changing how maritime technology is sold. Outcome-based pricing, phased rollouts and managed services are all attempts to reduce the distance between promise and proof. Basu argues that
providers confident in their value should increasingly be willing to connect commercial terms to measurable results. Cheap entry combined with payment for outcomes removes some of the leap of faith traditionally demanded from owners. Lehtinen favours phased implementation that demonstrates business value continuously rather than requiring a large upfront commitment before the evidence exists. Panken similarly supports outcomeled managed services with predictable costs, clear accountability and measurable performance. The aim is to avoid forcing customers into repeated technology bets as networks and applications evolve. This suits shipping’s temperament rather well. The industry does not need to become less commercially demanding about technology. Quite the opposite. Vendors should be forced to explain what changes, how it will be measured, what the baseline is and when the customer should expect to see a return. But owners also need to modernise what they count. If digital ROI is restricted to fuel, some of the most valuable applications will always struggle to clear the hurdle. Crew time, maintenance, off-hire, regulatory exposure, cyber resilience, safety, retention, financing, asset value and decision quality all have economic consequences. The next phase of maritime digitalisation will therefore depend as much on better accounting as better technology. Shipping will continue to open its wallet cautiously. Given its history, that is unlikely to change. The opportunity for maritime tech is to make the savings too obvious to ignore.
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CONSOLIDATION
Maritime tech enters its roll-up era Maritime tech is consolidating at record speed, but the real test is whether bigger platforms remove fragmentation or simply create larger silos
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aritime technology has entered its roll-up era. A sector once characterised by scores of small specialist vendors is being reshaped by corporate buyers and private equitybacked platforms seeking broader product suites, larger datasets and stronger recurring revenues. Research from Israeli maritime venture capital firm theDOCK identifies 381 acquisitions since 2017, when only eight deals were recorded. Activity accelerated sharply during shipping’s pandemicera digital push, with 93 transactions completed across 2019 and 2020, but the market has not fallen back to its earlier levels. TheDOCK counts a record 52 deals in 2025, while the pace in the first half of 2026 puts the combined two-year total on course to exceed 100. “Something fundamental has shifted in the maritime technology sector,” says Hannan Carmeli, theDOCK’s founder and managing partner. “Maritime tech consolidation is no longer an early signal. It is a defining market pattern.” Vessel operations and autonomous shipping account for more than onethird of the transactions tracked since 2017, spanning predictive maintenance, navigation software and remote-control systems. Supply chain and logistics
technology is the second-largest segment. Cybersecurity and maritime safety are gaining rapidly as ships, ports and shore offices become more connected, while sustainability software continues to attract buyers facing tighter emissions rules and complex reporting requirements. Corporate buyers still complete most deals, but private equity is becoming more influential. Francisco Partners-backed Veson Nautical, commodity data group Kpler and Marlin Equity Partners-backed Marcura are among the businesses expanding through acquisitions. The logic is clear: buy products, customers, expertise and proprietary data, combine them into a wider platform, and create a business with a compelling path to a future sale or listing.
Fragmentation exhaustion The industry is not opposed to consolidation. In fact, many buyers are exhausted by fragmentation. Fleets commonly run separate systems for safety, maintenance, procurement, voyage management, crewing, emissions, compliance and communications, each with its own login, data model and interface. The argument for combining
complementary products is therefore powerful. The argument for simply placing them under common ownership is much weaker. Tore Morten Olsen, president of maritime at Marlink, says the greatest opportunity is to bring digital services together on secure, technology-agnostic platforms. His concern is that acquisitions could replace “thousands of small silos with a handful of much larger ones”. Consolidation, he tells SplashTech, must deliver “openness, flexibility and choice, rather than bigger closed ecosystems”. Hrvoje Mihovilović, founder and chief executive of ELNAV.AI, reaches the same conclusion. Owners do not need 50 disconnected tools each solving 5% of the problem, he says, but they also cannot afford to lose control of the data layer, interfaces and customer relationship to a few dominant platforms. “The industry needs fewer silos, not bigger silos,” he tells SplashTech.
Integration and aggregation That distinction between integration and aggregation runs through almost every response gathered for this magazine. Janani Yagnamurthy, senior vice-president for product and strategic
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CONSOLIDATION
The industry needs fewer silos, not bigger silos growth at Marcura, argues that shipping needs consolidation at the workflow level. A company should not require 10 applications to manage one voyage or repeatedly enter the same information into different systems. But the resulting platforms must be supported by open APIs, data portability and continued access for specialist providers. Lars Laugen, chief digital transformation officer at OSM Thome, points to the back office as an obvious place for rationalisation. Shipmanagers can inherit another set of systems every time a company is acquired, leaving teams to stitch together overlapping finance, procurement, crewing and technical platforms. Fewer, better-integrated systems would remove friction. The catch is that integration must follow the deal rather than remain an item on a future roadmap. Sven Brooks, chief executive of ScanReach, warns that some transactions merely concentrate complexity. Bigger vendors acquire smaller businesses but continue running them as isolated product lines, leaving the operator with “the same fragmentation, just under one invoice”. Consolidation should reduce complexity for the customer, he says. “Too often it just concentrates it.”
Private equity The private equity model attracts particular scrutiny. Jacques Goudchaux, chief executive of AXSMarine, sees genuine value in combining voyage management platforms with market
intelligence, bringing operational execution and commercial context into one decision layer. His concern is with businesses acquired primarily to be bundled into a portfolio and sold within a typical investment cycle. Goudchaux warns that acquisitions designed around a short investment cycle can leave products and customers paying the price. “Product development slows, pricing power is exercised aggressively, and customer relationships become transactional,” he tells SplashTech. Maritime is a long-cycle industry that needs patient partners with domain depth, he argues. Some of the consolidation now underway “optimises for exit multiples, not for maritime outcomes”. Antonis Malaxianakis, founder and chief executive of HarborLab, similarly warns against consolidation driven by financial engineering rather than product complementarity. Large acquisitions that bundle disparate tools without meaningful integration create lockin without delivering proportionate value. “Customers don’t benefit from larger software portfolios,” he says. “They benefit from simpler workflows, better interoperability and measurable operational outcomes.” Ownership can also affect trust. David Evans, chief technology officer at Idwal, favours a curated ecosystem of specialist providers over a single monolith, provided the systems can exchange standardised data. He is especially concerned when independent inspection or data businesses are absorbed by owners, operators or insurers. Neutrality
is part of their value, he says, and the industry needs independent parties “to survive the consolidation wave, not be swallowed by it”. Not every consolidator is built around a rapid exit. Adam Dennett, chief executive of SpecTec, argues that long-term ownership can give maritime software the permanence that safety-critical customers require. SpecTec’s owner, Constellation Software, buys and holds businesses rather than working to a short disposal timetable. That model, he says, changes how a company invests in products and customer support. Dennett’s warning is for buyers whose systems are essential to daily operations: ask who owns the vendor, how long they intend to hold it and what happens to the product after year five. “Those questions get asked about ships and charterers all the time,” he tells SplashTech. “They should be asked about software too.” Consolidation will continue because the conditions behind it remain in place: too many point solutions, rising integration costs, growing demand for connected data and regulation that increasingly cuts across departments. The winners, however, will not necessarily be the companies that assemble the largest catalogues. They will be those that make the seams disappear. The test is practical. Can data move freely? Can customers still choose specialist tools? Are products genuinely integrated, supported and developed? Does the combination reduce screens, duplicated entry and administrative work? If the answer is no, the industry has not solved fragmentation. It has merely changed who sends the invoice.
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DIGITAL STANDARDS
The common language shipping still lacks Shipping’s digital ambitions are accelerating faster than the structures beneath them. The industry largely agrees on the need for open standards, but adoption remains constrained by proprietary interests, regulatory fragmentation and the absence of firm mandates
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hipping is no longer digitising in a regulatory vacuum, but the rules beneath its technology remain uneven, incomplete and slower moving than the tools entering daily use. The clearest recent marker comes from the International Maritime Organization, whose Maritime Safety Committee has just adopted the International Code of Safety for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships. The voluntary MASS Code entered into force on July 1, opening an experiencebuilding phase before mandatory requirements are developed. The code covers decision-support systems, remotely controlled ships, fully autonomous vessels and remote operations centres. Its weakness is scope. It says far less about the AI assistants, predictive maintenance tools and administrative software already spreading through wheelhouses, engine rooms and shore offices. Classification societies are beginning to fill parts of the gap. DNV’s RuleAgent,
for example, links its answers to source rules, establishing an important principle: maritime AI should be assistive, traceable and open to challenge. At Geneva Dry, the world’s premier commodities shipping conference, Lloyd’s Register’s Alberto Perez argued that accountability requires companies to define the function being deployed, its decision boundaries and its performance limits. The pressure is increasing as the EU AI Act moves into full enforcement, exposing companies to penalties when they cannot explain how systems are governed, what data they use and who remains accountable for decisions shaped by automated recommendations. That governance challenge sits above a more basic problem. Shipping still lacks a common digital language.
One language for vessel data Asked which single standard the industry should mandate, contributors repeatedly
return to vessel data. P K Mishra, managing director of IRClass, calls for common definitions covering equipment identity, sensor tags, voyage events, emissions, maintenance and noon-report equivalents. “Shipping does not suffer from a lack of data; it suffers from inconsistent data definitions,” he tells SplashTech. The aim, he stresses, is not to centralise every record, but to define minimum structures and meanings so information can move reliably between owners, yards, manufacturers, charterers, class societies and software providers. Patrick Ryan, senior vice-president and chief technology officer at ABS, says integration is among digitalisation’s largest hidden costs. Owners repeatedly fund bespoke work to connect systems because each vendor uses its own format and interface. With standardised data, adding a tool could become “close to plug-and-play rather than a six-month exercise”.
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DIGITAL STANDARDS
Pankaj Sharma, chief executive of OneLink Performance, describes interoperability as the foundation for AI, autonomy, emissions management and safer operations. Daniel Koch, head of vessel optimisation at Manta Marine Technologies, makes the commercial case: too much time is spent cleaning, preparing and integrating information before anyone can use it. Pradeep Chawla, chief executive of MarinePals, focuses on machinery. The full benefits of automation and reliability cannot be realised, he argues, unless data produced by different equipment can be analysed together. Casper Jensen, chief executive of GTT Marine, similarly calls for standardised, high-frequency operational data that automates reporting and prevents owners being trapped inside proprietary ecosystems. Nikhil Mathew, chairman and cofounder of Admaren Tech, widens the proposed standard to cargo particulars, tank data, hydrostatic information, port restrictions, voyage instructions and operational status. “A common standard would not force companies to use the same software,” he tells SplashTech. It would allow systems to communicate while preserving competition, provided secure authentication and responsibility for shared data are built in from the start.
Enter once, use everywhere The strongest immediate case for standardisation may be reporting. Gry Sørås, head of branding and sustainability at Siglar, selects a global format for emissions and voyage data exchange. The same information currently exists in multiple forms, increasing cost while weakening data quality precisely as environmental performance becomes a commercial issue. Friederike Hesse, managing director of ZERO44, would begin with the noon report, the foundational input for EU ETS, FuelEU Maritime, CII, EU MRV and IMO DCS. Reports arrive in numerous proprietary formats, forcing operators, compliance platforms and verifiers to cleanse and normalise data before
A ship is not a collection of isolated equipment. It is a system meaningful work begins. Credible frameworks already exist, Hesse notes, including the Smart Maritime Council’s Standardised Vessel Dataset and Energy LEAP’s Vessel Emissions Reporting Standard. “The technical groundwork is largely done. What is missing is mandate,” she tells SplashTech. Vendors have little incentive to surrender formats that create switching costs. Michael DeVolld, cybersecurity lead at ABS Consulting, reaches the same conclusion from the regulatory side. He calls for one harmonised emissions format across IMO DCS, EU MRV, FuelEU and national schemes: information “entered once, reused everywhere”. This would return thousands of working hours while improving the evidence received by regulators.
From chartering to port calls Standards are also needed around commercial decisions. Christoffer Svard, chief commercial officer at Sea, wants a harmonised record of chartering communications. Negotiations and decisions are scattered across WhatsApp, email and Teams, leaving the industry dependent on inconsistent, difficult-toreconstruct threads. A common structure would make that information usable across the value chain without forcing every participant onto one platform. Captain Kuba Szymanski, secretarygeneral of InterManager, points to the continuing bureaucracy surrounding port calls. A genuinely global Maritime Single Window would allow one standardised documentation set to be accepted by every port, replacing repeated submissions and incompatible national requirements. Other contributors identify less obvious but equally valuable common languages. Henning Davies, chief executive of LedgID, advocates a globally interoperable standard for professional identity, credentials and verification
events. Qualifications and compliance records should move securely across employers and jurisdictions rather than being repeatedly collected and checked. Ronald Spithout, managing director of OneHealth by VIKAND, extends that concept to seafarer-owned professional, personal and health records. A consent-based framework could reduce administration, improve labour mobility and give medical teams trusted information during emergencies. Vikas Pandey, chief executive of Shipfinex, proposes a universal, realtime vessel ownership and encumbrance registry. Title, mortgages and liens are currently fragmented across flags, banks, insurers and law firms. One authoritative record would reduce fraud, accelerate transactions and make shipping assets easier for institutional capital to understand. Craig West, chief executive Europe at Weathernews, wants a machine-readable standard for operating severity. Terms such as heavy weather remain subjective, leaving systems, operators, insurers and regulators without a shared baseline for disruption, claims or voyage decisions. The answer is not one giant maritime database. Peter Kraehenbuehl, vicepresident at WinGD, argues for structured ship-wide exchange combining common data models, cyber principles, access rights and clear responsibilities. “A ship is not a collection of isolated equipment. It is a system,” he says. Shipping already has many of the technical ingredients it needs. What it lacks is disciplined adoption and authority. A standard only creates value when competitors use it, regulators recognise it and customers can move their information without penalty. Until that happens, AI and automation will continue to sit on fragmented foundations, and the industry will keep paying people to translate between systems that should already understand one another.
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MARITIME SPECIAL
The digitally mature ship of 2030 will feel less complicated The next phase of digitalisation, according to Ben Palmer, president of Viasat Commercial, will be defined by measurable returns and technology that solves problems rather than creating new ones
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en Palmer is unusually candid about what Inmarsat got wrong as maritime digitalisation accelerated over the past five years. The mistake, says the president of Viasat Commercial, was underestimating just how quickly shipowners’ expectations would move beyond discussions about satellite coverage, bandwidth and individual networks. “I think we, along with much of the industry, underestimated the speed at which expectations would change,” Palmer tells SplashTech. Inmarsat spent years talking about coverage, capacity and satellite technologies. All remain important, he stresses, but increasingly they are not conversations customers particularly want to have. “They want their vessels connected. They want applications to work. They want their crews to have a good
experience. And they want somebody to take responsibility when things do not work as expected.” LEO connectivity helped change the benchmark. “LEO played an important role in resetting what people believed was possible at sea,” Palmer says. Crew expectations shifted quickly, cloud adoption accelerated and the comparison increasingly stopped being with what ships could do five years earlier and became what people already experienced ashore. “The lesson for us was that the customer should not have to care which network is delivering the experience. That is our problem to solve, not theirs,” he says. That philosophy underpins NexusWave, Viasat’s managed multinetwork maritime connectivity service, and Palmer sees it as part of a wider shift
in what shipping should expect from its technology suppliers.
Redundancy without complexity Multi-orbit connectivity has become one of shipping technology’s dominant themes, but Palmer cautions against assuming that simply bolting more networks onto a ship automatically creates resilience. “Redundancy only has value if it translates into continuity,” he says. A vessel with multiple satellite connections may appear more resilient, but if crews or shore teams are still required to switch manually between contracts, networks and hardware, owners may simply be replacing one vulnerability with another layer of complexity. “The real question should be: if one part of my connectivity environment is
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MARITIME SPECIAL
degraded or unavailable, do my critical applications and my crew continue operating without having to think about it?” For Palmer, that means the underlying technology should increasingly disappear from view. “Multi-orbit or multi-network connectivity should ultimately make life simpler for the shipowner, not more complicated,” he says. Connectivity itself is becoming part of the vessel’s operating infrastructure. Modern ships rely on it for navigation support, cyber security, maintenance, regulatory compliance, operational decision-making and crew welfare. “I would not suggest propulsion, navigation and connectivity carry identical consequences if they fail,” Palmer says, “but the direction of travel is very clear.” As vessels become more digital, secure connectivity becomes fundamental to more of what happens onboard. “And that importance will only increase over the lifetime of ships entering the fleet today,” Palmer explains.
Outsource complexity, not control The rapid expansion of maritime technology also raises a more strategic question: who actually controls the digital architecture of the vessel? Palmer’s answer is the shipowner. That does not mean owners need inhouse expertise covering every satellite constellation, OEM, cloud application and onboard system. “But there is an important distinction between outsourcing complexity and outsourcing control,” he says. Owners need to understand where their data resides, who can access it, how systems interact, what happens when connectivity fails and how easily new technologies can be added later. They should also be wary of architectures that effectively lock a vessel into a particular technology supplier for the remainder of its life. “The strongest model,” Palmer says, “is an ecosystem where the owner defines the operating requirements and trusted partners make the technology work together.”
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Complexity will increasingly sit behind the experience Increasingly, Palmer argues, the role of the connectivity provider is therefore expanding beyond simply delivering bandwidth.
The CFO test That evolution also changes how technology investment should be justified. Palmer argues that selling connectivity on price per vessel misses the point. “A CFO is not really interested in buying more bandwidth,” he says. “They are interested in whether the business is becoming more efficient, more resilient and less exposed to avoidable cost.” The metrics should therefore be operational: downtime avoided, technical problems solved remotely, travel eliminated, fuel performance improved, applications deployed faster and seafarers retained. There is also a multiplier effect. Owners are spending heavily on analytics, cloud platforms, automation and digital tools. Weak connectivity underneath those investments potentially limits the return from all of them. Palmer puts the argument like this: “The question for the CFO should not be, ‘What does connectivity cost me?’ It should be, ‘What value am I unable to unlock without it?’” That same discipline needs to be applied to the technology itself. Palmer is reluctant to nominate one fashionable technology that shipping will later regret buying. His concern is broader. “What I do think the industry will become much less tolerant of is technology for technology’s sake,” he reckons. AI is an obvious example. Palmer expects it to have a profound impact on shipping, but warns against adding AI simply because customers expect to see the letters somewhere in the product description. “The value will come from solving specific operational problems, improving decisions and reducing workload,” he says, “not from adding AI labels to existing products.” Nor should every new capability create another dashboard or another job for
already stretched crews. “If a technology makes the vessel more complicated without making the operation materially better, it probably has a short shelf life,” he says.
The invisible ship of 2030 By the end of the decade, Palmer expects the most advanced ships to be distinguished less by the amount of technology visible onboard than by the intelligence operating quietly behind it. Today, connectivity largely allows information to move between ship and shore. By 2030, the relationship between vessel, fleet and wider organisation should become far more continuous. Maintenance becomes predictive rather than reactive. Shore teams gain richer situational awareness. Routes, fuel consumption and operational decisions are continuously optimised using vessel and external data. Cyber security becomes more dynamic as the number of connected systems grows. The onboard experience should change just as dramatically. “Seafarers should not have to understand which satellite or network they are using,” Palmer says. “Applications should simply work, whether they are operational systems or a video call home.” The irony is that the increasingly sophisticated ship may ultimately feel less complicated to the people operating it hopefully. “In some respects, the most digitally mature vessel of 2030 will actually feel less technologically complicated to the people onboard,” Palmer says. “The complexity will increasingly sit behind the experience.” That is also the lasting lesson Palmer takes from the past five years. Technology providers will not always predict correctly how fast their markets will change. What matters is recognising when customers have moved on. “In technology, being right about the direction of travel is less important than being willing to change course when the industry moves faster than you expected,” Palmer concludes.
MARITIME SPECIAL
Drowning in data, starving for decisions The next digital race is not about collecting more data. It is about getting the right information to the right decision-maker before the opportunity to act has passed
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hipping has spent much of the past decade wiring up its ships. Engines, generators, fuel-flow meters, navigation equipment, shaft-power meters, cargo systems and countless other pieces of machinery can now produce continuous streams of information. Add AIS, weather, voyage reports, alarms, maintenance histories, photographs, emails and compliance records and the modern vessel can become a formidable data-generating machine. What happens next? Asked what percentage of vessel data is actually translated into operational decisions, SplashTech’s respondents produce estimates ranging from the low single digits to more than 60%. The numbers vary wildly, but the broad conclusion does not: maritime has become considerably better at generating and storing data than using it. Gert-Jan Panken, general manager and vice-president at Inmarsat Maritime, deliberately avoids attaching a neat percentage.
“Across the industry, the percentage is still relatively small,” he tells SplashTech, stressing that the figure varies substantially by operator and vessel type. For Panken, the pursuit of a higher percentage risks missing the point entirely. “The objective should not be to act on every data point but to identify which data can materially improve a decision, ensure it is reliable and make it available at the right time and in the right context.” That distinction gets to the heart of shipping’s data problem. A vessel might generate a billion additional data points without making one better decision.
Stop counting the terabytes For years, the size of a maritime data lake could itself be presented as evidence of digital progress. More sensors meant greater digital maturity. More information transmitted ashore meant a smarter fleet. More dashboard tiles suggested greater
visibility. Our survey is remarkably sceptical of that logic. Manish Singh of Maris Investments believes maritime is still in single digits when it comes to turning data into decisions. “Anyone claiming more is counting reports rather than decisions,” he says. Most vessel information, Singh argues, was originally gathered for compliance rather than operations. The fact that a value appears in a noon report, is displayed on a dashboard or gets incorporated into a monthly performance pack does not mean anybody changed course because of it. Nikhil Mathew, chairman and cofounder of Admaren Tech, applies a similarly demanding definition. Data becomes actionable only when it alters something tangible: a maintenance interval, route, speed, trim setting, spareparts order, inspection priority, risk control or instruction to the crew. On that basis, he believes less than 10% of available vessel data is
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MARITIME SPECIAL
consistently converted into operational decisions. “The focus should move from data collection to decision intelligence,” Mathew says. Panken from Inmarsat agrees. For him, the competitive advantage comes from filtering the mass of information down to the subset that is trustworthy enough and timely enough to matter. “Value comes from relevance and timing – not volume alone,” he says.
The signal is buried in the noise Collecting data has become relatively easy. Determining which information deserves attention remains much harder. Joy Basu, chief executive of Smart Ship Hub, gives perhaps the most visceral description of the problem. “Terabytes collected, a sliver acted upon,” he says. The differences between vessels are enormous. Basu sees modern ships capable of producing more than 3,000 high-frequency parameters, while older tonnage may expose closer to 200. Once information is normalised, however, he argues that perhaps 180 to 240 highfrequency parameters covering engines, flow meters, shaft power, bridge and navigation functions form the critical core required for predictive diagnostics and condition-based monitoring. Another 200-plus data points may provide supporting context and validation. That is a very different proposition from pouring everything into a lake and assuming value will eventually float to the surface. “The number that matters is not how much data you hoard but how much you convert into an action,” Basu says. Casper Jensen, chief executive of GTT Marine, reaches a similar conclusion. High-frequency information matters, he argues, but frequency by itself proves nothing. Data has to be relevant, accurate and trusted, validated at source and presented as a coherent operational picture. Peter Kraehenbuehl, vice-president at WinGD, is equally cautious about percentages. Machinery specialists can use operational information
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extremely effectively for diagnostics and performance support, he says, but fragmented datasets, inconsistent quality, access restrictions and customer concerns around sharing remain substantial obstacles. The problem is therefore not merely too much information. It is too much information of uncertain usefulness arriving through too many disconnected pipes.
Join structured telemetry to unstructured operational knowledge and both become significantly more useful. That is an important evolution in the maritime data story. The next data lake may contain fewer isolated numbers and considerably more context.
Context changes everything
Panken sees another important shift developing as digital architecture matures. For much of maritime digitalisation, progress has been equated with moving increasing amounts of vessel data ashore. Better satellite bandwidth reinforced the idea that everything should travel from ship to cloud for analysis. That model is starting to change. Inmarsat’s preferred architecture combines resilient multi-network connectivity with edge capabilities, cybersecurity and orchestration, allowing information to be managed intelligently between vessel and shore. That means increasingly deciding where processing should happen rather than simply asking whether connectivity is available. Some data belongs ashore for fleetlevel comparison, long-term analytics and specialist support. Other information is more useful processed close to where it is generated, particularly where latency, bandwidth, resilience or safety matter. Panken says the aim is a digital infrastructure capable of connecting “vessels, applications and people securely”, supporting everything from AI and predictive maintenance to remote operations. For data utilisation, the implication is important: the vessel does not always need to transmit everything it knows. It needs to transmit what somebody else needs to know. Moving from raw-data transfer towards useful operational information reduces noise, makes bandwidth more intelligent and can dramatically shorten the distance between detection and response.
Jacques Goudchaux, chief executive of AXSMarine, puts the industry-wide actionable figure somewhat higher at around 15–20%, with the best operators potentially reaching 30–35%. But his explanation matters more than the percentage. “The bottleneck is rarely data volume — it’s context and curation,” he says. A sensor value without a reference baseline can be meaningless. Fuel consumption without weather or voyage context can mislead. A machinery reading without knowing what happened immediately before it may be incapable of explaining the problem. Raw data needs to be combined with commercial, historical and operational context before it becomes intelligence. Matthew Talbot, co-CEO of Complexio, takes that argument into territory shipping has barely started to explore. He estimates that the proportion of vessel telemetry changing a decision today remains in the low single digits. But Talbot argues that focusing exclusively on telemetry produces the wrong denominator. Ships do not run on sensors alone. An enormous amount of operational intelligence lives in superintendent emails, attendance reports, attachments, instructions, messages and conversations. A sensor log might reveal that a pump ran hot. Combine that with the superintendent’s email, the previous three attendance reports and the crew’s actions and suddenly the company has an explanation rather than simply an observation. Talbot argues that shipping has spent a decade instrumenting the vessel while doing comparatively little to make its own correspondence machine-readable.
From the cloud back to the ship
How high can the number go? Not everybody accepts that single-digit utilisation is inevitable.
MARITIME SPECIAL
Value comes from relevance and timing – not volume alone Pankaj Sharma, chief executive of OneLink Performance, offers the survey’s most bullish assessment. With a mature and integrated platform, he believes 60– 80% or more of vessel data can become actionable insight. The information has to be unified, analysed and delivered to the right person in time to influence routing, maintenance, bunkering or compliance. Sharma’s figure therefore describes what a mature architecture can potentially achieve rather than the current industry average. Others remain more conservative. Kris Vedat, chief executive of SmartSea, estimates the industry currently operationalises less than 20% of the data it generates. Peter Schellenberger of Novamaxis reckons the figure is below 10%. Mikko Kuosa, chief executive of NAPA, questions whether a percentage should be the KPI at all. A high-frequency sensor can generate thousands of observations while contributing to one useful decision. Another piece of information collected once might prevent a casualty. Treating the two as equal units in a data-utilisation calculation makes little sense. Kuosa instead focuses on data continuity: operational information feeding performance models, lessons travelling across fleets and knowledge from ships in service informing future designs. The goal is not utilisation for
utilisation’s sake. It is to make sure insight reaches a person or process capable of acting on it.
The missing last mile This may be the most significant weakness in maritime’s data architecture. The industry has invested heavily in the journey from sensor to server. Far less attention has been paid to the final metre from information to human action. A recommendation arriving after the commercial decision has been made is historical analysis. A machinery warning buried among hundreds of alerts is noise. A performance recommendation sent to somebody without authority to change the speed cannot save fuel. The right data also needs the right owner. Panken points to fragmented sources, inconsistent quality and unclear ownership as continuing barriers. The next phase of digitalisation, he argues, should focus on turning selected information into repeatable operational actions. A superintendent spotting an anomaly once is useful. A system capable of reliably surfacing the same anomaly across 100 ships, directing it to the correct person and recording what happened next is a digital capability. That requires integration between data, workflow and decision authority. It also requires restraint. Not every alarm needs another alert. Not every sensor needs streaming ashore. Not every dataset deserves an AI model.
From data lake to decision loop The language of maritime digitalisation is consequently starting to change. The previous decade was about collection: sensors, connectivity, cloud storage and dashboards. The next looks increasingly concerned with decision loops. What happened? Is the information reliable? Does it matter? Who needs to know? What action should follow? Did that action work? That final question closes the loop, allowing organisations to learn which information genuinely creates value and which merely occupies storage. Artificial intelligence will accelerate this process enormously. It can identify correlations humans miss, combine many sources simultaneously and surface patterns across enormous fleets. But AI also makes data discipline more important. Feeding an intelligent system a larger quantity of poorly contextualised information simply allows it to reach the wrong conclusion faster. Panken’s prescription is therefore surprisingly simple for an industry fascinated by increasingly sophisticated technology. Stop generating data for its own sake. Identify the information that improves a decision. Make sure it can be trusted. Deliver it when there is still time to act. Connect it to a repeatable workflow. A modern ship may produce terabytes. The smart ship will know which few megabytes actually matter.
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MARITIME SPECIAL
Shipping’s AI train leaves before the tracks are finished A recent panel discussion hosted by Inmarsat Maritime brought five industry experts together to debate the strategic realities of the digitally connected fleet
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recent panel discussion hosted by Inmarsat Maritime brought five industry experts together to debate the strategic realities of the digitally connected fleet. Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving maritime conversations from what the technology can do to what it can actually deliver. But has shipping’s ‘AI train’ already left the station, or is the industry still laying the tracks? That question ran through Inmarsat Maritime’s recent ‘Digitally Connected Fleet’ panel at Singapore Maritime Week 2026, where five industry experts debated the opportunities and risks created by increasingly connected ships. Anders Nordahl, head of IT and business intelligence at Berge Bulk, said the value lies in turning vast volumes of operational information into measurable outcomes. Berge Bulk uses 4bn data points across its fleet, including to compare sisterships fitted with different wind-assisted propulsion systems. Yet collecting data is no longer the challenge. Uttam Kumar, director of IT business partnering at Synergy Marine Group, argued shipping is already “drowning in data” and “overwhelmed with the insight” it produces. “But is [this insight] getting translated into action?” he asked. “That’s what we should focus on.”
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Peter Schellenberger, director at Novamaxis,a consultancy, said this requires an IT structure that actually verifies that the source of the data is curated and cleaned. Justin Yi, regional director for APAC at Inmarsat Maritime, agreed, arguing that processing data before transmitting it ashore makes workloads “easier and lighter”. He described the approach as effectively giving the vessel and shore “two brains”, allowing faster decisionmaking without sending everything to the cloud. Greater connectivity, however, also increases cyber exposure. “With any innovation or any technology that we bring onboard, cybersecurity should not be taken for granted,” Kumar cautioned. Yi said traditional onboard security often concentrates on protecting the vessel’s “front door”, while secure-bydesign connectivity must also protect data moving between ship and shore. For Schellenberger, technology alone is insufficient. “80% of cyber-incidents are not through unsafe connectivity from A to B,” he said, but through the people that use and circumvent the systems. Georgiana Barsan, group IT manager for APAC at Wilhelmsen, similarly identified people as the biggest security gap. As employees experiment with
new AI tools and LLMs, companies risk uncontrolled software putting sensitive information into public cloud environments. Her solution is governance. “You need to have good control, guidelines, and guardrails in place and common understanding,” she said. Control also extends to how connectivity changes life onboard. Yi recalled one customer whose crews welcomed seamless connectivity but increasingly found themselves pulled into shore-side video calls, leaving them feeling deprived of their control over the way they operate their vessels. Schellenberger was more optimistic, arguing future operating systems should empower seafarers and not control them. Nordahl nevertheless warned against excessive dependence on artificial intelligence. “If you rely too much on the opinion of the AI model without thinking, then we get into a very dangerous situation,” he said. The challenge, therefore, is not deciding whether AI is coming to shipping, but ensuring the industry has the data, connectivity, governance and human judgement needed to make it useful. Moderator Nakul Malhotra perhaps summed up the contradiction best: “The AI train has left – hang on a second – the tracks are still being built.”
MARITIME SPECIAL
The industry’s first digital generation comes with new pressures New research reveals how constant connectivity is reshaping seafarers’ wellbeing, resilience and expectations as shipping’s digital generation heads to sea
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oung seafarers are entering shipping more connected than any generation before them, but a major study warns that constant access to the online world is bringing a fresh set of pressures to life at sea. Sailors’ Society’s 2025/26 Cadet Report, titled The first digital seafarer generation, draws on 2,624 cadets, ratings and trainees from 30 countries who contributed through the charity’s global Wellness at Sea conferences. The number of voices represented is up 20.9% on last year. More than 9,100 people attended the conferences during 2025. The report shifts the focus from recruitment and retention to what Sailors’ Society describes as the “inner world” of the next generation, examining social media pressure, digital dependency, mental health, bullying, rights and confidence in reporting problems. The regional differences are striking. Some 83% of Chinese respondents and 78% of those from Southeast Asia said they felt pressure to appear happy or successful on social media, compared with just 35% from the Indian subcontinent. Heavy device use was also most evident in Europe and Southeast Asia. Three-
quarters of Southeast Asian respondents and 70% of those from the UK and Europe spent at least three hours online each day. In Southeast Asia, 59% said they sometimes felt addicted to their devices and another 16% said they felt this very often. In China, the equivalent figures were 52% and 10%. The digital world is not simply a negative, however. Internet access remains an important link with families, friends, education and support services. The report, sponsored by Inmarsat Maritime, stresses that connectivity can reduce isolation and support wellbeing, while warning that the way young seafarers use it increasingly matters as much as access itself. More than half of the Southeast Asian and Chinese active seafarers polled reported stress or anxiety linked to online interactions. More than half of respondents from Southeast Asia and the UK and Europe had either experienced or witnessed cyberbullying or negative online behaviour. Mental health preparedness is another area where the results vary sharply. In Africa, 61% said they felt very prepared to handle mental health challenges at sea,
against 23% in the UK and Europe. Just 34% of Chinese respondents felt fully equipped to support a crewmate showing signs of poor mental health. One of the clearest findings is the growing importance of peer support. Sailors’ Society says young seafarers increasingly turn to friends and colleagues before formal welfare services, with peer support becoming a practical and preferred route for help. The charity now runs more than 250 peer groups with more than 3,500 members. The report also highlights uneven confidence in reporting bullying and harassment. While 72% of respondents from the Indian subcontinent said they would definitely feel safe reporting such behaviour, the figure fell to 43% in the UK and Europe, where 14% cited fear of retaliation. Rights awareness followed a similar regional pattern. The clear message from the study is that providing connectivity is no longer enough. The first generation to arrive at sea with smartphones, social media and permanent online lives will also require stronger digital literacy, mental health training, peer networks and credible reporting systems.
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DATA OWNERSHIP
Who owns the ship’s data? The answer sounds simple: the owner. In practice, vessel data passes through OEMs, managers, charterers, ports and technology platforms, turning access, interpretation and derived value into one of maritime digitalisation’s thorniest disputes
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hipping has spent years arguing that data is the new oil. It has spent considerably less time deciding who owns the refinery. A modern vessel produces information continuously: engine performance, fuel consumption, machinery condition, navigation, cargo, weather, maintenance, emissions and crew-generated records. That information can pass through the systems of the owner, manager, charterer, OEM, class society, port, insurer and technology vendor, sometimes within the same voyage. Everyone can create value from it. Not everyone agrees on where the rights begin and end. Across SplashTech’s survey, however, one principle attracts remarkable support: the operational data generated by a ship should remain under the control of the shipowner or operator. The argument becomes more complicated the moment that data leaves the vessel. The commercial stakes rise as AI makes aggregated operational histories more valuable, reusable and difficult to disentangle later. Gert-Jan Panken, general manager and
vice-president at Inmarsat Maritime, says the shipowner should retain ownership and control, while sharing takes place only through clearly defined permissions, for an agreed purpose and with transparency over how information will be used. The challenge is avoiding a model in which protecting ownership becomes an excuse for keeping information trapped inside proprietary systems. Joy Basu, chief executive of Smart Ship Hub, puts it more sharply. “Ownership and secrecy are not the same thing,” he tells SplashTech. Data that never leaves the ship creates little value, he argues, proposing owner control combined with permissioned, standardised sharing to operators, charterers, OEMs, insurers and ports. Nico Lehtinen, director of digital transformation at Elomatic, adds an important distinction. Owners should control operational data, while suppliers retain their intellectual property. Commercial agreements then need to ensure that owners can access the information required to optimise an
asset throughout its lifecycle without appropriating the technology provider’s know-how.
Ownership is the easy bit Jamie Jones, managing director of GTMaritime, argues that maritime spends too much energy on the headline question. Raw data is inert until somebody can interpret it. For Jones, data generated by a vessel during normal operation belongs to the vessel owner. The real contest is over access and interpretability. A stream of machinery signals is of limited use without the codebook explaining what each point means. Whoever controls that interpretive layer can effectively control the information even when ownership technically sits elsewhere. “An owner can sit on terabytes and still be locked out, paying for the privilege of reading their own information,” Jones tells SplashTech. His proposed dividing line is simple. Owners should receive the raw data and
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DATA OWNERSHIP
the means to interpret it as a baseline right. OEMs should be able to charge for genuine value they create on top: diagnostics, benchmarking, predictive models and specialist recommendations. Charging for expertise is legitimate; withholding access to the underlying signal purely to preserve dependency is not. Sven Brooks, chief executive of ScanReach, reaches much the same conclusion. “Data ownership should sit with the vessel operator, full stop,” he says. An infrastructure provider’s job is to move information reliably rather than lock it up. Brooks argues that too many vendors continue to treat data as a retention mechanism, making standardised access more important than endless debate over ownership.
Raw data versus derived value Many contributors make the point that not all data is the same Antonis Malaxianakis, founder and chief executive of HarborLab, separates the operational record from the derived layer. The factual record of what happened reasonably belongs to whoever generated it, he argues, while an insight created through investment in software, analytics or specialist expertise can belong to the party that created that additional value. That approach produces four questions that every contract should answer: who owns the data, who can access it, how it can be used and whether access can be revoked. Mikko Kuosa, chief executive of NAPA, approaches the issue across the vessel lifecycle. A shipyard owns the 3D model it creates during design; operational information belongs to those generating it; and shipowners or operators control their vessel data. The opportunity lies between those points. Aggregated and anonymised datasets can reveal safety or performance patterns across fleets without exposing an individual company’s commercially sensitive information. Pradeep Chawla, chief executive of MarinePals, says this is where the
Shipping’s data problem is becoming less about possession than power fairness question becomes unavoidable. A small owner with three ships can benefit enormously if engine failure data is analysed across 300 vessels. But the bargain looks different if an OEM uses pooled customer data only to sharpen spare-parts pricing or overhaul policies. Sharing has to create value for all participants, not merely improve one party’s information advantage.
Sharing without surrender That need for reciprocity runs throughout the responses. Data sharing is not philanthropy. Owners will share when they understand what goes out, what comes back and what commercial risk they are assuming. Peter Kraehenbuehl, vice-president, product centre at WinGD, says ownership and access must be separated clearly. Owners or operators remain in control, while OEMs receive selected information where it improves diagnostics, remote support, condition-based maintenance or compliance. The rules should define what is shared, for what purpose, with whom, for how long and under what cybersecurity conditions. Petter Andersen, vice-president at StormGeo, frames the structure around “source, purpose and responsibility”. Ports, for example, do not need unrestricted access to a vessel’s commercial or technical history simply because they participate in a port call. They need the information required for safe and efficient operations, equipment support or compliance. Portability, security and permitted use therefore matter as much as ownership. Panken makes the same point from the connectivity side. Open interfaces and common standards are necessary because maritime digitalisation cannot progress when operational information remains trapped in separate environments. But interoperability without governance
creates its own risk. Trust depends on permissions, confidentiality and cyber resilience being designed into the exchange rather than added later.
A bargain everyone can live with The emerging model is therefore neither an industry-wide data free-for-all nor thousands of private vaults. Basu envisages a trusted single source of truth from which each participant receives the slice relevant to them. Lehtinen argues that data has little inherent value until it improves a decision. Both positions point toward the same destination: control stays with the legitimate owner, access is purposespecific, formats are standardised and value created from shared information is recognised. That still leaves difficult questions around AI. If a vendor trains a model on operational data from hundreds of customers, who owns the resulting intelligence? How much should contributing owners know about secondary uses? Can permission be withdrawn after data has helped train a product? The survey does not produce one universal answer, but Malaxianakis’s four-part test offers a useful starting point: ownership, access, use and revocation must be explicit before the data moves. Shipping’s data problem is therefore becoming less about possession than power. Control can sit on paper with the owner while practical control sits with the vendor holding the interface, schema or analytics layer. The industry needs a bargain that rewards expertise without rewarding captivity. Owners should not expect every derived insight for free, and vendors should not expect to hold operational data hostage because they supplied the equipment or platform.
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LEGACY MINDSET
The hardest system to replace
Shipping’s resistance to digital change is often blamed on age, regulation and risk aversion. It’s more nuanced than that
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most revealing answer to a technology question is sometimes not about technology at all. Asked which legacy mindset maritime must abandon to unlock innovation, SplashTech contributors point less to old hardware or obsolete software than to the assumptions governing how companies are organised, how risk is understood and how success is measured. The familiar description of shipping as a digital laggard is itself among the ideas due for retirement. Matt Filosa, vice president of strategy and operations at Veson Nautical, says the label is outdated. Maritime remains relationship-driven, but technology is already pushing those relationships and workflows forward. The more useful task is to showcase disciplined applications of AI and data rather than either portraying shipping as hopelessly behind or suggesting companies are indiscriminately placing AI over every process. That matters because the laggard narrative can become an excuse. It allows vendors to blame customers, and operators to treat slow adoption as an immutable industry characteristic. Grigoris Lamprou, co-founder and chief executive of Procureship, sees the discussion changing. Companies
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are moving from questioning whether digitalisation is necessary to identifying where it creates competitive advantage. The shift sounds modest, but it changes the starting point. Technology is no longer an optional modernisation project. It becomes a way to redesign work, remove friction and improve decisions. Philippe Lavarde of Closelink describes the same trap from another angle. Too many organisations still classify digitalisation as an IT project, he says, when the value only appears after processes, decision rights and working methods change with the software. That distinction determines who leads the programme, which budget pays for it and how results are judged. When IT is left to deliver transformation alone, operational teams can remain passive customers and vendors end up automating requirements nobody has challenged. When the business owns the change, technology becomes one component of a wider redesign rather than the project’s sole visible outcome.
Stop digitising the org chart Jamie Jones, managing director of GTMaritime, identifies the departmental structure of shipping companies as a
larger barrier than their technology stack. Chartering, operations and technical teams guard their own responsibilities, are measured against separate targets and pass problems across organisational boundaries. “Most of the money the industry loses is lost in exactly those handovers,” he relays. Digital investment frequently reinforces this fragmentation. A tool is purchased to make one department faster, yet the voyage as a whole performs no better because nobody owns the result across the entire operation. Jones says the belief that optimising each box automatically produces a better business “has to go”. Kris Vedat, chief executive of SmartSea, extends the argument from departments to vessels. The idea that each ship is an isolated, self-contained environment is increasingly obsolete. Ships are connected to technical teams, performance centres, ports and suppliers, but fleets are still commonly managed vessel by vessel. Vedat argues that the fleet should instead be treated as an intelligent operational network, distributing expertise, information and lessons consistently while preserving onboard
LEGACY MINDSET
authority. The change is organisational before it is technical. Sensors and connectivity can link vessels, but management must decide to operate them as a network. This is where many transformation projects fail. Companies install a digital version of the existing hierarchy and then wonder why performance barely changes. A fragmented process does not become integrated because its forms move online.
From clean reports to useful truth Fabian Fussek, chief executive and co-founder of Kaiko Systems, takes aim at another deeply embedded habit: reporting designed to make the fleet look good rather than reveal what is actually happening. Shipping often judges an inspection by the cleanliness of the final report, he says. That encourages people to sanitise reality, suppress weak signals and present defects as exceptions rather than evidence. Digitalisation only creates genuine value when the early reporting of a serious problem is treated as a success rather than an embarrassment. Mikko Kuosa, chief executive of NAPA, reaches a related conclusion through compliance. For decades, logbooks, permits and checklists have been created with an inspector as the imagined reader. The record proves that a task was completed, survives an audit and then disappears into a binder or archive. Kuosa says compliance should be the
starting point, not the finish line. Captured digitally, the same information can perform two jobs: satisfy the inspector and inform the operation. A permit record can reveal a fleet-wide risk pattern; a logbook can become an operating baseline; voyage reports can feed back into vessel design. The question for operators is uncomfortable: how much information created by crews is ever read by anyone other than an auditor? When the answer is close to zero, the company has digitised evidence, not intelligence.
Rethinking risk and return Maritime caution has rational foundations. Assets last for decades, failures carry severe consequences and investment decisions must survive several market cycles. Dualog’s Morten Lind-Olsen notes that many maritime investments have horizons exceeding 20 years, inevitably shaping the industry’s mindset. The problem begins when long asset lives are used to justify short organisational imaginations. Dimitris Giouris, owner and co-founder of Kyma Technologies, says shipping must abandon the idea that reliability and innovation are opposing forces. Risk consciousness is necessary, but caution does not require resistance. The strongest organisations innovate while maintaining operational discipline. Matt Gilbert, founder of Yuni, pushes the criticism further. He argues that half a century of efficiency doctrines has encouraged companies across industries,
including shipping, to optimise away capability, optionality and resilience. Systems become leaner but more brittle, leaving little capacity to experiment, absorb shocks or respond when assumptions fail. Innovation therefore requires a broader definition of efficiency. The cheapest process in normal conditions may be expensive when disruption arrives. Spare capacity, alternative suppliers, human expertise and reversible trials can appear inefficient on a spreadsheet while protecting the business in practice. The same rethink applies to people. ShipMoney’s Stuart Ostrow challenges the treatment of crew wages as a backoffice function. Payroll is one of the few recurring points of contact between a shipping company and the people operating its vessels. Managed purely as administration, it is optimised for cost. Viewed as a welfare and retention tool, it is optimised for trust. That example captures the wider lesson from the responses. Shipping’s legacy mindset is not simply a preference for old technology. It is the habit of defining functions too narrowly: reports as compliance, payroll as administration, ships as islands, departments as separate businesses and caution as inaction. The industry does not need to discard its experience. It needs to stop using experience as a reason not to question the structures built around it. The most valuable digital transformation will begin when companies redesign the operation first and choose the technology second.
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SEAFARER SKILLSETS
The officer who knows when the machine is wrong AI will not make seamanship obsolete. It will make human judgement more valuable, as tomorrow’s crews learn to interrogate data, challenge automation and take control when increasingly intelligent systems get it wrong
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he crew of 2035 will not be short of technology. The more difficult question is whether they will be trained to challenge it. Asked to identify the single most important skill future seafarers will need that maritime academies do not teach today, SplashTech respondents repeatedly return to variations of the same idea: digital judgement. Not coding. Not becoming a data scientist. The ability to understand what an intelligent system is telling you, recognise when its inputs or assumptions are weak, and know when experience must overrule the machine. The urgency is already visible onboard. Dualog’s recent survey of around 300 seafarers and senior officers, half of them masters and with an average of more than 20 years at sea, finds surprisingly little resistance to artificial intelligence. Half have already experimented with AI. Ten face-to-face interviews with seafarers and shore personnel reinforce the picture. “Seafarers are already using it – they want help solving problems,” Silje Moan,
chief commercial officer at Dualog, tells SplashTech. The obstacle is not curiosity. It is trust, source control and information overload. Connectivity has improved so dramatically that the frustration is shifting from getting information to finding the right information among manuals, procedures, messages and corporate systems. Dualog finds that improving findability makes crew 2.5 times more likely to be satisfied. Moan also points to the administrative burden sitting on the bridge. Captains, she says, spend more than 50% of their time on admin work. AI could remove a large part of that burden, but only if it works from approved company sources and gives officers confidence that its answer can be relied upon.
Judgement beats fluency Gert-Jan Panken, general manager and vice-president at Inmarsat Maritime, calls the required skill “digital judgement”.
Seafarers will work with automated systems, AI-generated recommendations, remote support and growing volumes of operational data. The important capability will be knowing when to trust the technology, when to question it and how to combine digital insight with professional experience. Cyber awareness, he adds, will become part of normal operational competence rather than a specialist subject. Joy Basu, chief executive of Smart Ship Hub, reaches the same conclusion through data literacy. Future officers need the confidence to read, question and act on data rather than either obeying AI or ignoring it. “By 2035 the vessel will not be short of data; it will be short of people fluent enough to turn that data into good decisions under real-world pressure,” he treckons. Patrick Ryan, senior vice-president and chief technology officer at ABS, argues that as AI takes over more of the operational layer, seafarers will move increasingly towards oversight. That
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demands deeper, not weaker, domain knowledge. An engineer needs enough understanding to spot an implausible maintenance recommendation; a navigator needs the fundamentals to identify the edge case the algorithm misses.
Keeping the old skills alive Garry Noonan, director of innovation at Ardmore Shipping, puts the requirement more starkly: the future seafarer must retain “the ability to operate when the system isn’t there”. The danger of increasingly capable digital systems is not simply that they fail. It is that human capability can atrophy while they work perfectly. GNSS can be jammed or spoofed, ECDIS can freeze and optimisation software can produce a recommendation that simply looks wrong. In each case, somebody onboard must recognise the problem and know what comes next. Noonan argues that academies should embrace technology without allowing traditional fundamentals to be crowded out. Navigation, engineering knowledge and situational awareness become more valuable when crews are supervising automation because they provide the independent reference against which technology is judged. Jamie Jones, managing director of GTMaritime, gives the concept a name: “cyber-seamanship”. By 2035, he argues, a ship will be a fully connected and partly autonomous node, creating emergencies that may arrive through a data connection rather than as smoke, flooding or machinery noise. A manipulated navigation feed or compromised control system might leave every screen looking normal. Traditional emergency training has turned responses to fire, flooding and abandonment into instinct. Jones argues digital casualties require the same treatment: officers must detect compromise, isolate affected systems and recover control under pressure.
Learning to supervise the machine Other contributors widen the definition beyond cyber risk. Henning Davies, chief executive of LedgID, argues for “digital governance”: the ability to manage and interpret a growing landscape of tools, alerts, indicators and automated processes as seafarers move from repetitive execution towards system supervision. Fabian Fussek, chief executive of Kaiko Systems, focuses on structured observation. Ships will still depend heavily on what humans see, hear and experience onboard. The future skill is capturing that observation in a form that both machines and shore teams can interpret, while retaining the judgement to challenge a digital system when experience says it is wrong. P K Mishra, managing director of IRClass, similarly stresses automation bias. Future training needs to cover data literacy, cyber hygiene, alarm prioritisation and human-machine teamwork, he argues. The efficient officer is not the one who trusts technology most enthusiastically, but the one who adapts to it intelligently. This is where the maritime academy curriculum faces a difficult balancing act. The answer is not to add a generic AI module and declare the problem solved. Digital judgement has to be trained inside navigation, engineering, cargo operations, maintenance and emergency response, because that is where it will actually be exercised.
More than an IT skill The survey also produces answers that remind the industry not to define the future seafarer too narrowly. Stuart Ostrow of ShipMoney chooses financial confidence. Seafarers are increasingly paid through digital and prepaid systems while supporting families across several currencies and jurisdictions. Knowing how to protect,
The skill is having the judgment and competence to know when not to rely on it
manage and move money, he argues, will become an important part of working life at sea and remains barely addressed in conventional training. That returns the argument to Dualog’s findings. Seafarers are not asking primarily for more technology. They are asking for technology that helps them find answers, reduces administration and supports decisions. Moan expects the captain of the near future to have a knowledgeable assistant using the vessel’s own documentation and data, capable of responding to a situation rather than merely searching documents. The successful seafarer of 2035 therefore looks less like an IT specialist than a well-equipped mariner: traditional competence reinforced by data literacy, cyber awareness, critical thinking and the confidence to interrogate automation. The defining relationship will not be human versus machine. It will be the quality of the partnership between them. AI can search faster, monitor more signals and identify patterns no person could process unaided. The officer remains responsible for understanding the sea, the ship and the consequences when the model gets it wrong. Shipping academies have spent generations teaching people how to take command of a vessel. Their next challenge is teaching them how to remain in command when the vessel itself starts giving advice.
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BARRIERS
Why maritime tech struggles to scale Integration, trust, talent and the stubborn difficulty of proving what digitalisation is actually worth
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hipping has become good at running digital pilots. Scaling them is another matter. The critique of private equity in shipmanagement begins with a simple observation: the business does not fit neatly into a three-to-five year investment thesis. Across SplashTech’s survey, integration emerges as the most frequently cited barrier to fleetwide digitalisation. The problem is less that maritime lacks technology than that it has accumulated technology in disconnected layers. Vessels remain in service for decades, gathering machinery, sensors, software and communications systems from different generations and suppliers. Add shore platforms, chartering systems, compliance tools and corporate IT, and almost every rollout becomes an integration project before it becomes an operational one. Dr Shahrin Osman, business development director at DNV Maritime Advisory, says integration sits at the centre of the industry’s other problems. Large volumes of maritime data remain fragmented across equipment suppliers and operating environments, often using different naming conventions
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and structures. Until information is standardised, contextualised and reliable, trust is difficult to build and successful pilots struggle to move across fleets. Friederike Hesse, managing director of ZERO44, sees the same problem in carbon compliance. Vessel emissions information can arrive late, differ between noon reports and verifier outputs and require manual reconciliation. Technical, finance and commercial teams can then work from different datasets and update cycles, creating real financial consequences. Cost, trust and skills matter, she says, but are often symptoms of the underlying integration problem. Philippe Lavarde of Closelink makes the point more simply: maritime already has plenty of digital systems, but too many operate in isolation. Standardised APIs and seamless workflows matter because a standalone application is not transformation; it is another interface for people to manage. The problem is especially acute
across mixed fleets. Older vessels cannot be treated like newbuildings designed around modern connectivity and data architecture. Every additional variation in onboard equipment turns standard deployment into bespoke engineering.
Legacy beneath the software That leads to a barrier receiving less attention than AI skills or software pricing: the physical and digital estate already installed onboard. Timo Biemüller, vice-president at Speedcast, says costs are falling and cloud systems are becoming easier to integrate, but much of the world fleet is still running technology installed years or even decades ago. Outdated operating systems and legacy applications can have limited upgrade paths and create cybersecurity vulnerabilities while constraining what can be built above them. “You can’t build a trusted, scalable digital layer on top of legacy technology
You can’t build a trusted, scalable digital layer on top of legacy technology that was never designed to support it
BARRIERS
that was never designed to support it,” he says. His point turns the conventional digitalisation discussion upside down. A sophisticated new application is irrelevant if the network underneath it cannot support reliable data exchange, or if installing it creates operational risk. The barrier is not always resistance to the future. Sometimes it is the technical inheritance of the past. Peter Schellenberger from the consultancy Novamaxis identifies a structural problem: maritime itself is a small market. Specialist systems may require substantial development for a relatively limited addressable fleet, making the economics unattractive compared with technology built for automotive, aviation or consumer markets. That helps explain why generic solutions are repeatedly adapted for shipping and why genuinely maritime-specific products can be expensive. Russ Hubbard, chief commercial officer at Veson Nautical, points to another scarce resource: people. Maritime digital transformation requires experienced
operators who understand the workflows being redesigned, yet those are precisely the people companies struggle to release for technology projects. The issue can look like a funding problem when the shortage is organisational bench strength.
Trust has to be earned Technology that integrates perfectly can still fail if nobody trusts it. Dualog’s Silje Moan points to research among more than 300 seafarers in which trust and reliability emerge as the biggest barrier. Morten Lind-Olsen, also of Dualog, argues that trust becomes more important as AI spreads through an industry operating amid geopolitical uncertainty. The caution is rational. A wrong recommendation can affect safety, machinery or a multimillion-dollar commercial decision. Operators therefore demand evidence before changing established workflows, especially when AI outputs depend on data whose quality or provenance may not be obvious to the user. That is also why scaling exposes
weaknesses that pilots can hide. A trial normally has enthusiastic participants, concentrated vendor attention and a defined problem. Fleet deployment introduces different vessels, crews, routes, equipment and levels of digital maturity. The question stops being whether the software works and becomes whether the organisation can use it consistently. This is where user experience matters. Complex systems add training requirements and administrative load precisely when technology is supposed to remove them. A successful platform has to fit into the operation rather than demand that the operation continually accommodate the platform.
Show me the money Maritime is not fundamentally short of capital. Owners routinely commit enormous sums when the commercial case is understood. Digitalisation struggles because benefits such as better decisions, reduced workload, stronger compliance and avoided failures can sit across different budgets and appear over different time horizons. Friederike Hesse, managing director of ZERO44, argues that uncertainty is often entirely rational. Shipowners operate in cyclical markets and are understandably reluctant to fund transformation programmes with diffuse long-term returns. Her solution is to make the value specific to the owner. In carbon compliance, the difference between managing EU ETS, FuelEU Maritime and CII exposure well or poorly can be translated directly into euros using a company’s own voyages, charter terms and regulatory exposure. Nikhil Mathew, chairman and co-founder of Admaren Tech, favours phased implementation around a clearly defined operational problem. Prove increased cargo intake, fewer errors, shorter planning times or improved utilisation on a small number of vessels, then scale. Subscription pricing and measurable milestones reduce the size of the initial bet.
Dimitris Giouris, owner and co-founder of Kyma Technologies, sees outcome-linked compensation gaining ground. Instead of selling a licence and leaving the owner with all implementation risk, vendors can share accountability by tying commercial rewards to actual operational results. Managed-service models offer another route. Rather than buying infrastructure and coordinating numerous suppliers, operators purchase a defined level of performance with predictable costs and clearer accountability. The attraction is less financial engineering than shifting responsibility towards the provider claiming it can deliver the result. The common denominator is reversibility. Smaller steps, measurable baselines, subscriptions and outcome-based contracts turn digital investment from a leap of faith into a sequence of decisions. Weak projects can stop; successful ones earn the right to expand. Maritime’s digital barrier is not one thing. Integration creates cost, fragmentation undermines trust, poor trust weakens adoption, limited adoption destroys ROI and uncertain ROI blocks funding. Each problem reinforces the next.
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OPINION
Why maritime AI demands better Artificial intelligence can transform maritime operations, but its success will depend on keeping experienced people at the centre of decision-making, accountability and risk management, writes Irene Rosberg from Copenhagen Business School
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or some time, we have heard a great deal about the benefits of artificial intelligence in maritime operations. AI can help optimise fuel consumption, improve safety through collisionavoidance tools and give operators earlier warning of machinery problems, helping them avoid costly emergency repairs and breakdowns. These are important developments, but we hear far less about the irreplaceable human element behind them. What about safety judgement, accountability and the adaptability needed to make these systems work effectively in practice? There is a danger that, in our enthusiasm for AI, we forget that maritime operations remain highly complex and unpredictable. Human experience and intuition will continue to guide many of the industry’s most important decisions. Maritime professionals must interpret international law, understand operational realities and respond to emergencies that do not follow a set pattern. AI can process millions of data points quickly and identify patterns that would be impossible for one person
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to see. However, the human element must remain in the loop. People must interpret the analysis, evaluate risk in complex situations and decide whether a system’s recommendation is appropriate. This is where experience, intuition and adaptability remain essential. The real value of AI will not come from removing people from the decisionmaking process, but from combining technological capability with human judgement. Maritime leaders must recognise that greater efficiency requires more than technology alone. It calls for collaboration across the value chain, with people helping to bridge functional silos and build more resilient organisations. Successful adoption will also require continuous upskilling and cognitive flexibility. Employees at sea and ashore need to understand systems, recognise their limitations and retain the confidence to question them. The industry must avoid creating such dependence on automation that people no longer challenge its conclusions. There is also the question of accountability and legal responsibility. Who will be held responsible when
something goes wrong due to a system malfunction or poor programming? Is it the technology developer, or the person who relied on it and verified the output? These questions cannot be ignored. Companies need governance around how AI systems are selected, tested and used. They must define where human oversight is required, who can challenge an automated recommendation and how responsibility will be allocated if the system fails. AI’s dependence on large volumes of sensitive data creates vulnerabilities around cybersecurity; it is therefore of great importance that cyber resilience be treated as a strategic priority. The industry must also face the impact of automation on employment. This is already becoming an issue in ports and terminals. Advanced technology can improve efficiency and remove people from hazardous tasks, but it can also reduce the need for certain roles and change established working practices. Labour unions look at this from the perspective of protecting workers’ livelihoods. Their concerns should not be dismissed as resistance to progress.
OPINION
r leadership Employees need to understand how their roles may change, what training will be available and whether the benefits created by automation will be shared with the workforce. This requires better leadership and earlier consultation. People are more likely to support change when they understand its purpose and have a role in shaping how it is introduced. AI is here to stay, so the industry must
invest in upskilling its people; this means improving digital and IT literacy, but also developing critical thinking, problemsolving, and the confidence to manage and challenge AI tools. The future should not be presented as a choice between technology and people. AI can bring considerable value to shipping, but only when it is used responsibly and supported by experienced
professionals who understand the wider context. The maritime companies that adapt successfully will not necessarily be those that remove the greatest number of people from their operations. They will be those that use AI to strengthen human capability, support better decisions and create organisations that are both more efficient and more resilient.
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OPINION
The baseline for maritime digitalisation Operators should have an integrated approach to software and a willingness to re-think how to achieve their goals, writes Steve Bomgardner from ABS Wavesight
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igitalisation and the deployment of maritime software should be focused on supporting efforts to make shipping safer, more sustainable and more efficient. That sounds like a big ask, but these subjects are so closely related that they are all parts of the same picture. Get the foundations right and it’s possible to cascade the effects so that the benefits are distributed across functions and departments, users and clients. The overriding aim is to help reduce complexity for the decision-maker in the process, which can ultimately be a critical differentiator. The right technology should earn its place by helping to reduce operational burden, not adding to it. Shipowners and vessel operators already face enough demands from clients, regulators and other agencies. In contrast, software should help reduce burdens. Even in the current geopolitical and regulatory climate, attention remains focused on compliance, not least because it directly impacts performance on a voyage basis. The impact of the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) means operators have to minimise the impact and risks of regulation and explore new ways of optimising operational strategies. The day-to-day requirements of industry standards like the Tanker Management Safety Assessment (TMSA) program and ISM Code reporting require simplified, streamlined access to vessel data. In the specific case of Fuel EU Maritime, there is a strong need to optimise the pooling mechanisms available to owners, extending beyond a controlled fleet to wider pool partners. This requires a peer-to-peer approach robust enough to solve a problem that will become more demanding as requirements tighten over time.
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Some of the latest changes have been to include biofuels and biofuel blends into the fuel mix, in order to reflect their growing importance to compliance options, and as more alternative fuels are consumed in greater volume, the need for faster, smarter reporting that doesn’t wait for year-end deadlines becomes all the more important. Increasingly, vessel operators will also need to gather supply chain carbon emissions data, from scope two and even scope one sources. They may soon need to present this on demand, so the ease with which they can provide verified information will be increasingly important. When we take a broader look at technology enablement, it’s obvious that customers have come to treat a valid picture of vessel condition as a minimum expectation. It’s become the entry point for fleet management and necessary without a combination of separate products, as operators need a cohesive suite of solutions that can help integrate compliance, front-end maintenance and purchasing functions. For operators evaluating fleet management software, the biggest opportunity is not simply digitalising existing workflows. It is rethinking how work gets done. A digital system has its own workflow, and companies that are willing to adapt their processes to take advantage of that will see a very different outcome than those that force new tools
into old habits. It’s important to remember that shipping doesn’t operate in a vacuum; we are part of a broader ecosystem in which the supply chain, ports and bunkering are major components. There is a real opportunity to go beyond using compliance data purely for regulatory purposes, and to start connecting it to broader safety oversight. When maintenance records, inspection findings, compliance workflows and operational reporting all live within the same platform, patterns can become visible that would otherwise stay hidden across disconnected systems. A recurring equipment issue that appears in maintenance data, for example, can be reviewed alongside inspection history and compliance status to help build an earlier and more complete picture of potential risk. That kind of connected visibility can be difficult to achieve when safety, maintenance and compliance are managed in separate tools by separate teams. But when the data is already flowing through a shared system, the foundation for better safety decisionmaking may already be in place. Digital platforms should be agnostic as the focus should be on doing everything possible to increase the functionality available to seafarers, giving them the ability to quickly receive and integrate information into daily operations in support of safety, sustainability and efficiency.
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