Chartering desks relying on the same handful of digital platforms now routinely price cargoes within a few cents of each other — and that convergence is pushing the competitive edge back onto human judgement, relationships and proprietary data. That was the central message from the Chartering Spotlight session at last week's Splash Singapore, where charterers, operators and technology providers debated how AI and transparency are reshaping the fixing process.

Torbjørn Gjervik, CEO of Western Bulk, said the proliferation of common platforms means competing desks increasingly reach remarkably similar conclusions.

"We all use basically the same two, three platforms," he said. "Quite often we experience that we are pricing stuff within a few cents of each other."

The differentiator, he argued, is how the information is interpreted. "The digital tool is great to have. It's a necessity, but it can never become your alibi," Gjervik said, stressing that freight traders remain accountable for their decisions and that market feel still counts. He also issued a warning to the industry's next generation: young entrants need to learn the fundamentals by hand.

"Young people today coming into the business, they need to learn how to run a calculation on a piece of paper. It must be taught, otherwise you're just eventually going to lose track of what it is that you're actually doing."

Jesper Klarup, vice president chartering and managing director Singapore at Fednav, made the commercial case for scale. Larger operators hold proprietary information from their own fixtures and operations, which they can combine with external platforms. Technology helps smaller operators get started, but lasting advantage still requires forward-looking intelligence generated through customers and relationships.

"If you only go by the data that is available in those systems, you will not beat the market," Klarup said. "You get that from humans being out, having coffees with customers and understanding what they need."

For Michelle Gonzalez, head of chartering, long-term contracts and operations for APAC and the Middle East at Vale, the challenge is no longer finding information. "Data itself doesn't make better decisions," she said. "Actually, we have an abundance of data nowadays."

Vale's approach rests on three pillars: data quality, integration and experience. The miner has built a platform connecting specialised systems so decision-makers can see information across the wider supply chain. "The success of the corporations is not going to be about how much information, how much data they have," Gonzalez said, "but how fast they are to transform this data into information and, most importantly, into action."

AI already processes enormous volumes of information in seconds, but Gonzalez rejected the notion that algorithms are about to take over the fixing desk. "We are not leaving AI to fix contracts, fix freights, and we go to the beach or we go to the bar, have a beer," she quipped. AI can model scenarios, improve workflows and present options, she said, but it remains weak at understanding context, geopolitics and the accumulated expertise behind commercial judgement.

Willem Vermaat, shipping director at Heidelberg Materials Trading, described chartering as a combination of "science and art". Greater visibility into emissions and vessel performance is changing which ships make the shortlist, but economics still dominate the eventual fixture. "The worst performers are filtered away before starting evaluating the available vessels," he said. Paying slightly more for a better-performing ship can be justified, but "paying a premium, a high premium, is still very difficult".

When competing freight offers arrive within cents of one another, personal relationships decide the outcome. "Things change, but then also they don't change," Vermaat said. Reliability, reputation and execution ultimately influence who gets the cargo.

Stephen Fletcher, chief commercial officer at AXSMarine, said AI's immediate value lies in structuring unstructured information and analysing datasets too large for charterers to process manually during fast-moving negotiations. Within five years, he envisages companies using AI to capture conversations and institutional knowledge across trading desks, creating a company "brain" accessible throughout the organisation.

Yet even the technology provider returned to the human element. "People buy from people they like," Fletcher said. "There is an element of socialisation, just getting out there and meeting people and building relationships."

The session, moderated by RightShip executive director Sachin Singh, closed on its hardest unresolved question: if AI performs more of the basic work through which junior staff traditionally gain experience, who becomes shipping's expert of tomorrow? Gonzalez advised young recruits to study fundamentals rather than specialise in data analytics; Vermaat said companies must actively allow junior staff to make mistakes; Fletcher called for training programmes that get young employees away from screens and onto ships, into ports and across international offices.

The counterintuitive conclusion: as data, platforms and AI become available to everyone, technology itself becomes less of a differentiator. The edge increasingly lies in proprietary knowledge, faster action, trusted relationships — and people capable of questioning what the machine tells them.