Don’t mistake AI’s ambitions for shipping’s reality
Shipping loves technology, it just struggles to understand it at scale. Those old enough to remember the impact the dotcom boom (and bust) had on shipping have all the evidence they need of what happens when traditional industries get a glimpse of a high-tech future.
If 2025 was the year of AI hype in shipping, strap in for what promises to be more of the same in 2026. Listen to its promoters and AI has the potential for application in everything from ship design to broking, marine insurance to cargo handling and beyond.
So far, this has evidenced itself mostly in the people who seek to lead the industry talking about its importance as a differentiator. Listen carefully and what you hear more clearly is how they plan to use it to make efficiency savings and increase automation, rather than actually do the big things differently.
Still, it’s exciting to hear about what AI might do, though whether that is enough to justify the prominence in current discourse or the corporate valuations of the big providers is another question entirely.
Good as AI is at writing your report, making funny videos and helping you find a pharmacy in an unfamiliar city, it is a long way from being central to the business of operating ships, trading commodities or running a port.
The reason has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with business models. In shipping, a safe and profitable voyage is the over-riding aim. It works on trust and relationships and ultimately, it’s a transaction that relies on experience, skill and intuition in order to capture the market upside.
AI is already able to present some of these characteristics as if it actually possessed them, but the main difference between shipping and AI is that tech companies simply aren’t focussed on making money. They don’t need to be.
Their reason to exist is founded on disrupting enough of the global economy to one day be able to create value for their investors. Navigating disruption in order to deliver value is something that shipping companies quietly achieve in the real world, every day.
So yes, let’s listen to the prophets in 2026 and prepare ourselves for a future in which AI becomes more embedded in processes that it can do faster, though not always better, than humans.
But let’s listen harder still for some evidence that AI as currently envisaged is anywhere near being a game-changer, or that those who claim it to be so can demonstrate an understanding of the industry they are attempting to disrupt. After all, real world events appear to be doing that well enough by themselves.
