It was a privilege to be invited to share my thoughts in the 27th Annual Marine Money Athens on where and why we still struggle with the adoption of AI and digital tools in the Greek market and what role they can play in improving operational efficiency if better utilized.
Digital tools and AI lack the tension and tangibility we’re used to generating our power from.
We can’t meet AI at a conference and read it the way we do people, which is foundational in our industry.
We hear a lot of unhelpful things like how AI is going to be 100x bigger than the Industrial Revolution. It moves too fast to ever keep up with or regulate. We hear it’s coming for all our jobs. It often feels more like a dystopian thriller than an entrepreneurial play.
If we want to realize the potential behind what’s driving all this investment though, we need to stop thinking of it like a get rich quick scheme or “just a tool” and start looking at it like a strategic new hire instead.
Why hire someone new in the first place? There’s something you want done better than it’s currently being done. There’s an orientation process. You introduce them to the team, walk them through your systems, tell them who to report to and support. They’re socialized into the role and monitored. Access builds over time. Trust comes from results, and results build confidence.
We also need to start looking at our vendors more as partners, rather than just providers.
Shipowners need to bring vendors in to form working groups before implementation. This time spent upfront — discussing what’s proposed, how it’ll be used, its limitations, and all the integration points like workflow, training, and systems — is critical to solve the right problems, in the right way, at the right time.
At the moment, the complaint is (and often rightly so) that we’ve got a bunch of innovative products that don’t fully grasp the complexity of shipping, how interconnected everything is and how introducing something new in one area can introduce risk in another.
Shipping is not backwards when it comes to technology. What we’re missing is something more akin to translation – BlackRock calls them centaurs – half human, half developer – so that both sides can begin to cooperate in the same language.
Thank you again to Kevin Oates and Mia Jensen for the opportunity, and to our moderator, Dr. Christos Sigalas, and my fellow panelists Stavros Gyftakis, Peter Borup, and Symeon Pariaros for the vibrant discussion!
