Maritime’s AI Leap: Skipping Digital to Go Straight to IQ

The maritime industry operates on complexity but unfortunately, it also runs on email. Most documents are created for human consumption, not systems. Think PDFs instead of APIs. Important records like vessel safety certificates often sit buried in inboxes. Risk assessments are stitched together from spreadsheets, vessel inspection reports, and manual processes. This lack of structured data makes critical processes – like chartering, compliance and risk evaluation – sluggish, error-prone, and reactive. It’s not just a tech debt problem; it’s a bottleneck that ripples through every commercial and operational decision in the maritime ecosystem.

But here’s the opportunity: unlike other sectors that had to crawl through digital transformation, maritime now has a chance to leap — straight into the AI era.

An Industry Built on Human-Only Workflows

The maritime industry missed the digital revolution. While sectors like finance, logistics and other industries built digital workflows and API ecosystems, maritime remained fragmented. Information isn’t discoverable; it has to be requested, shared, re-shared, and reconciled. Each step creates more work, less time, and more room for error.

For vessel operators and charterers, this often means hours spent searching for information, validating documents, and reconciling inspection records—under time pressure and with less than 24 hours to make a go/no-go decision.

This creates a paradox: vast volumes of maritime data exist, yet little of it is actionable at scale. AI is about to change that.

Why AI Is Maritime’s Best Chance to Leap Ahead

In many industries, adopting AI means retrofitting legacy systems, cleaning up years of inconsistent data, and building layers of APIs. But Maritime’s analogue foundation allows us to approach the challenge differently.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other tech leaders have noted, “SaaS as we know it is dead.” The era of traditional SaaS is giving way to AI-first experiences where intelligent agents operate across systems, managing tasks that once required human intervention or dedicated apps. With agentic AI, systems that can read documents, interact with software, and take autonomous action — the user interface isn’t a screen anymore. It’s an agent that gets the job done.

This shift is particularly well-suited to maritime. Instead of retrofitting portals or building integration layers, we can embed AI directly into existing workflows — unlocking value from day one.

But what happens to the human workforce? It’s a fair question. AI doesn’t replace people; it actually elevates their role! By automating repetitive tasks like parsing documents or drafting summaries, maritime professionals can focus where it counts: judgment, experience, and strategic decisions.

Humans remain at the centre, not buried in admin, but steering outcomes. No more chasing expired certificates or formatting inspection close-outs. With AI as a teammate, professionals are freed up to lead, analyse, and act.

Solving Real Maritime Pain Points with AI

These challenges aren’t theoretical. Maritime professionals face them every day: needing to evaluate vessels quickly, respond to regulators, and prepare for inspections with little lead time. It’s this reality that guides how we build at RightShip.

Take vessel vetting, for example. Traditionally, this process was bogged down by repetitive emails, manual cross-checks, and document and certificate verifications. These tasks slow down turnaround times—especially when teams have tight deadlines to assess a vessel’s suitability and risk.

With RightShip’s Due Diligence Hub, we’ve introduced a hybrid AI-human workflow, orchestrated by intelligent AI agents that streamline document analysis, rule validation, and escalation to our subject matter experts when needed.

The AI will parse vessel documents the moment they’re uploaded — extracting key data points, identifying gaps, and comparing the inputs against customised vetting rules. If everything checks out, results are issued instantly. If something needs a closer look, it’s routed to a vetting specialist with context-rich insights generated by AI. 

The result is a hybrid system where AI and humans collaborate seamlessly. Time-to-decision drops. Consistency increases. And the specialists — the ones who understand operational nuance — get to focus on edge cases, not paperwork.

This also enables us to move into an era where we go from transactional to an always-on model in which this decision support is running constantly 24/7. 

Another great example is RightShip’s PSC RiskIQ. It uses AI to read and learn from over two decades of Port State Control reports, surfacing the real-world focus areas inspectors are targeting by region, vessel type, and trend. Before a vessel enters port, it flags likely areas of scrutiny, giving crews the insight to prepare with precision, not guesswork.

It also analyses a fleet’s inspection history to identify recurring deficiencies, generating targeted focus areas for each vessel. Crews don’t just get a deficiency count — they get nuanced insights and a clear, step-by-step checklist to proactively reduce risk.

What these solutions have in common is their ability to eliminate friction, reduce manual effort, and speed up decision-making—while enhancing safety and compliance outcomes.

The maritime industry is complex; global, high-stakes, and full of operational nuance. Risk isn’t always in the numbers; it’s often hidden in inspection notes, incident narratives, or operational patterns. In critical workflows like vetting, you can’t rely on numbers alone. True risk often reveals itself in the details: how a deficiency is described, the language in an incident report, or subtle inconsistencies across inspections. 

At RightShip, we’re using AI to capture those signals. Our models go beyond structured data to extract qualitative insights from reports, certificates, and free-text records — the kind of pattern recognition and judgment that used to depend entirely on human experts.

Now, we can scale that expertise — consistently, transparently, and fast. AI doesn’t replace human judgment. It extends it. And in a domain where the difference between acceptable and risky often comes down to context, that’s a game changer.

From Service to Intelligence: The Shift Towards Always-On Decision-Making

AI is doing more than streamlining maritime workflows — it’s unlocking judgment, consistency, context, and foresight at scale. This shift is not only transforming RightShip but also signalling a broader industry evolution — from manual, service-based processes to intelligence-led operations that are always on, adaptive, and context-aware. Powered by AI and guided by human expertise, this evolution is laying the foundation for smarter decisions, stronger safety outcomes, and more sustainable practices across the maritime value chain.

Attributed to: Marlon Grech, Chief Technology and Product Officer at RightShip