Page 100 - ΝΑΥΤΙΚΑ ΧΡΟΝΙΚΑ - MARTIOS 2023

SMART SHIPPING
Mr Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos focuses on Artificial Intelligence and Big Data and how it
can enhance vessel performance.
AI ΙS ALREADY
AN ABSOLUTE
NECESSITY
Big data analysis is considered vital to boosting the operational
performance of vessels. Will it become necessary for compa-
nies to employ people with relevant knowledge to perform
in-house evaluations of their fleets’ performance? Will this be
possible for smaller companies, or will outsourcing become a
common practice? in the future?
I would say the opposite is true. In terms of under-
standing and improving vessel performance, we’re
reaching the limit of what any shipping company can
do internally - regardless of company size. In fact, to
be more specific, we are reaching the limit of what
they can do accurately.
That happens naturally in every industry – a technol-
ogy or approach gradually becomes increasingly spe-
cialised – and delivers more and more impact. There
is, of course, a complexity limit to what any company
can – and should – consider doing ‘in-house’. Until a
few years ago, ‘industry standard’ approaches to fleet
performance fell below this limit - so most compa-
nies invested in people and infrastructure to do this
themselves. Fleet performance became an in-house
specialisation in the age of noon reports and low fuel
prices.
That age is over, and there are two fundamental rea-
sons why. Firstly, technology has rapidly advanced in
complexity. Every serious owner or operator is now
either deploying – or planning to deploy – a bank of
approaches, including high-frequency data collec-
tion, advanced modelling techniques (such as AI), and
cloud-based infrastructure. Attempting to build the
expertise to do all this in-house is a fool’s errand, as
many companies have found to their detriment. While
larger and even smaller companies have built very
impressive in-house systems, maintaining and keeping
these systems up to date as technology advances
by become increasingly expensive, and the risk of being
Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos stuck with a legacy solution becomes unavoidable.
Co-founder and CEO, DeepSea
At the same time, the company’s in-house teams can
100
repeat work already done by others and cannot
reap any of the benefits offered by solutions that
incorporate learnings from multiple companies
into modelling processes. This pathway is a liv-
ing nightmare – I strongly urge no company to
consider it.
Secondly (and very positively), technology has
rapidly advanced in results. Today’s solutions do
more than “evaluate” a fleet’s performance - they
radically improve it (by up to 10% in DeepSea’s
case). These well-proven approaches are fast
becoming standard in the industry, so anyone
looking to “strategically” build these capabilities
in-house needs to be certain of their success
and able to beat what’s already out there.
For companies of all sizes, the game is now
about choosing the right tools. For example,
when was the last time anybody built their own
internet browser in-house?
New technologies are expected to alter the necessary
skills set a seafarer should have. Does this refer mainly
to their general familiarity with technology, or are there
explicit skills that will be deemed essential for seafarers
Very much in line with my previous answer, we’re
already seeing the same sort of transition hap-
pening on board vessels. There are a series
of core functions that a vessel will always be
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required to perform in order to operate effec-
tively. These include tasks such as route plan-
ning (for minimum fuel consumption and safety),
responding to weather conditions, altering
speeds, watchkeeping, reporting, cargo planning,
and many others. These are currently part of the
core “in-house” skills all seafarers must master.
However, as technology develops, these tasks
will, and are, becoming increasingly automated
– often completed to a higher standard than
human workers are capable of.
The ‘captain of the digital age’ has a broad
understanding of all these areas – like the CEO
of a company – and, importantly, understands
how they fit together to achieve a strategic goal.
They understand which ‘levers’ they can pull to
achieve their objectives. Seafarers will develop
specialisations that facilitate the interaction
between, and processes around, these different
systems. Their task will become, in many ways, a
specialised form of general management.
Critically, they will need to have a good under-
standing of the limitations of each technological
system they use and what, in exceptional circum-
stances, should be done manually. Today’s airline
pilots already work this way – their primary job
is not to be specialists in manual flight. Today’s
planes are highly automated, and most of the
flying is done by the aircraft’s computer systems.
Picture © Ein Dahmer
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