

On March 23, 2021, a ship – Ever Given – was passing through one of the crucial trade routes of the world; unfortunately, it was caught in a severe sandstorm which caused the ship to swing towards the bank. It wedged deep into the land blocking the entire canal for six days. The canal accounts for $9billion worth of global trade per day. This means that the incident caused a loss of $54 billion, not to mention the toll-collection loss of $90 million for the Egyptian authorities.
The whole incident, the huge loss could have been avoided if the ship used an AI-based system to get weather forecasts.
AI can hugely benefit the shipping industry and increase its efficiency while lowering the cost of operations. Maritime logistics is an industry where timing is extremely crucial for successful operations. AI systems can enhance predictive capabilities to streamline operations and prevent bottlenecks with the help of real-time analytics and predictive scheduling. Furthermore, to automate processes in the shipping industry, we need AI as well.
Read on to know where the shipping industry is heading in terms of AI adoption, the barriers to this adoption and what the future holds.
The industry leaders are highly confident that AI can solve many pain points that the maritime industry faces today. What are these pain points?
AI-based systems can solve and are already solving most of these problems for forward-thinking companies.
Companies create automated technologies within their ERP system to create individual portals for suppliers, carriers, brokers, etc. This ensures a streamlined shipping process with no back and forths among various stakeholders. Information gets passed on quickly. The AI-based system can intelligently send relevant information to relevant apartments. You can use ERP to forecast bottlenecks. Based on historical data, it can forecast whether there will be any delay in shipping any item. And based on this report, you can take action to prevent bottlenecks.
Even if the stakeholders in the industry are not connected with integrated software, we can still take advantage of AI-based text extractors to automate entering data on invoices and emails into computers in a structured form. We already have effective text extractors. But without AI, these text extractors can’t understand the context of the extracted texts. So companies have started using Intelligent Document Processing which is powered by AI.
With data from the ship’s sensors and a lot of benchmark data, AI can predict fuel consumption. This prediction can be used to optimize a ship’s fuel consumption. For example, AI can combine the sensor data with the weather data to chart a re-routing strategy. This weather-based rerouting can save almost 10% of the fuel and related cost.
Shipping carriers or shipping lines can predict volumes based on historical data. This enables them to scale up or scale down their resources which prevents bottlenecks and unnecessary spending.
Many stakeholders in the supply chain industry are using AI-based tracking technology that uses forecasting models like real-time weather data, GPS, distance, etc. With this, they are now quite accurately able to gauge when cargo is going to arrive. The most significant use of this technology is that companies can drastically reduce the number of backup stocks in their warehouse since they now have a real-time cargo tracking system.
Freight rate is one of the things that fluctuates so much that creating a quote seems daunting. However, with an AI-based freight rate management system, creating reliable and instant quotes saves a lot of frustration.
Despite the promising potential that AI holds, the implementation of AI-based systems in the shipping industry has many obstacles in the path-
Yet despite all these challenges, more and more shipping lines, exporters and importers, charterers and freight forwarders are pushing towards AI-based systems to cut costs and achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency. It’s just the beginning. The shipping industry and, along with that, the entire supply chain will be revolutionized as companies march towards AI. It’s exciting to be in the shipping business.