The technology needed to digitalise global shipping is already deployed on fleets – what's missing is the organisational plumbing to use it, panellists at Inmarsat Maritime's 'Connected to Perform' seminar in Hamburg argued during SMM Hamburg.

Audra Drablos, Strategy Director at Inmarsat Maritime, put it bluntly. Technology is no longer the issue.

"We're connecting global fleets," she said. "We're using advanced analytics. We're using preventative maintenance. So the technology, I think, is definitely there."

The gap sits elsewhere: in how organisations handle the decisions those tools surface. "If we want to digitalise things, we also have to transform all the decision processes that we have," Drablos said.

What does that look like in practice?

Three operators on the panel showed the machinery already running:

• Hapag-Lloyd – real-time cargo tracking and voyage optimisation, built to maximise speed and flexibility, with a Fleet Data Ecosystem pooling data so the carrier can "look at it holistically, interconnect it, and then drive the right insights out of it," said Patrick Briest, Senior Director of Operations for IT Products.
• Fairplay Towage – predictive maintenance to keep tugs operationally ready, said Fleet Captain Konstantin Pohsin.
• Anglo-Eastern – artificial intelligence applied to vessel emissions management, highlighted by Matthias Becker, Managing Director of Anglo-Eastern Germany.

All three, though, echoed Drablos. Each named work still in progress.

For Anglo-Eastern, the problem is fragmented systems. "We get a lot of data today, and that's in isolated systems and products," Becker said. The company expects to "uncover more savings and make better decisions" once it connects them.

Briest went further, arguing the dashboard alone changes nothing. "Even if you have the dashboard – the tool that tells you what you should be doing – you have to change the way the whole organisation works, that processes work, that people work, to actually make it happen," he said.

Who closes the knowledge gap?

Fairplay Towage is betting on training. Pohsin identified a "gap in knowledge" around connected onboard systems and said the company must "investigate what is the proper way for educating all our employees in the application of these facilities."

Becker doubts training alone gets the industry there. Digital transformation is a "complex challenge" that needs interdepartmental and cross-industry collaboration.

"Seafarers will not become IT experts," he said. "Technicians remain technicians, and we have to bridge the gap in some way. So we have to bring together the crew, the offshore personnel, and the data analytics and IT side. We also need cooperation between operators, owners, managers, OEMs, and providers of IT systems."

A recurring theme: technology should support crews, not replace them. Pohsin's message to seafarers was "don't stop thinking with your own brain." The point of AI, panellists suggested, is lifting time-consuming data-analysis and compliance work off people.

Drablos pointed to a recent Seafarers Happiness Index report showing the lowest happiness scores sit with seafarers carrying the most responsibility. "It could help in prioritising all that data and helping [seafarers] make better decisions," she said of AI.

Briest added that AI frees crews to focus on running vessels – and that cloud-based AI applications will push connectivity demand up. "I believe the general connectivity requirement for these more intelligent, AI-driven systems is probably going to get bigger," he said.

Secure by design, not security bolted on

More connectivity means more exposure. Drablos framed the risk question the right way round: "The question isn't really about connectivity versus security. The question is how you can build security as your basis when you're implementing your connectivity... making it secure by design."

That principle underpins Inmarsat's NexusWave, a fully managed, bonded multi-network connectivity solution. In a speech introducing the seminar, Gert-Jan Panken, General Manager and Vice President at Inmarsat Maritime, referenced recent cyber security type approval from ClassNK and Bureau Veritas against IACS' Unified Requirement E27.

"That shows from an independent source that the way NexusWave has been built is compliant and in line with the requirements our customers ask us for," Panken said.

He also reframed what buyers should be shopping for: connectivity is becoming less about the connection itself and more about what it enables. "It's not only about the fast internet connection," he summarised. "It's really about building that underlying infrastructure which actually helps us to drive business outcomes."

For shipowners and managers, the trajectory is clear: as AI-driven applications multiply fleet-side, expect connectivity requirements – and the security standards attached to them – to keep climbing.