Three Maritime Pain Points Gen AI Can Heal

Maintaining consistent workflows is particularly challenging when it involves repetitive tasks. This difficulty is amplified in expertise-specific domains, such as the shipping industry, where accurate decisions can take time, and time equals significant sums of money. This problem, together with the complexity and vastness of possible risks in the maritime ecosystem, raises three main challenges for stakeholders: 

Decreased productivity: evolving risk management requirements have significantly increased interactions between stakeholders across the supply chain. With a shortage of experts to manage these communications and increased due diligence complexity, relevant teams face productivity challenges with vessel risk screening and communication that can be extremely time consuming. 

Lack of human resources expertise: according to Gartner, one of the key challenges in the industry is hiring and training team members. Maritime is a specialized area, where the need for sanctions and risk experts far exceeds the supply. Organizations are struggling to hire, train and onboard experts – both in terms of speed and depth of domain understanding.

Counterparty communications: increased interactions between stakeholders and their counterparties has raised a standardization challenge. To increase efficiency, and maintain alignment, organizations must standardize their approach and queries to counterparties.

Once organizations recognize their specific challenges, advanced technologies, such as AI, can speed onboarding and training, and raise productivity among current employees.

MAI Expert™

To address these challenges, Windward has expanded our Maritime AI™ portfolio to introduce Windward Gen AI Agent – MAI Expert™. The industry’s FIRST Gen AI agent is a virtual maritime risk subject matter expert that leverages Windward’s proprietary AI models and human expertise, using innovative Gen AI engines. It is generally available now. 

Designed for precision and efficiency, MAI Expert™ empowers your decision-making with comprehensive risk assessments and insight summaries. It seamlessly integrates a reliable maritime and risk expert into your daily workflows and automates repetitive tasks to offer a strategic edge, and reliability.

MAI Expert™ provides a tangible ROI per user that starts from 5 times for small organizations and up to 88 times for large ones with a significant screening volume.

Powered by our expertise, sanctions-focused prompt and unique data, MAI Expert™ can reduce vessel screening and investigation times by 20 minutes per screening on average via the following capabilities: 

• Risk assessment: quickly generate a vessel risk assessment and insight summary, highlighting any gaps that may raise suspicion, notable discrepancies, and issues requiring escalated investigations, such as a company’s lack of insurance, or a recent suspicious vessel ownership change.

• Email inquiry drafts: auto-generate query email drafts with selectable templates – communications to an insurance company, shipowner, client, etc. –  and conversational tones. These can be sent to counterparties, offering a review of vague and open issues with a vessel(s). By ensuring consistency in both external and internal communications, MAI Expert™ acts as a reliable standard

• Adverse media screening: media screening for negative news across various public media sources. 

These above capabilities greatly alleviate the problems of decreased productivity and human resources deficiencies. The agent functions as a valuable training tool and streamlines onboarding processes, because employees no longer need to spend huge amounts of time understanding the intricacies of the maritime risk domain, and learning how to manually assess exposure to risk. 

Stakeholders can save 20 minutes per pre- and post-fixture screening process with the risk summaries and adverse media screening, enabling teams to complete more vessel screenings per day and increase business opportunities and growth. The auto-generated emails will also save time and resources, while ensuring clear communication, and full transparency of decision-making processes. 

This is Only the Beginning…

It’s a natural evolution for Windward, the leading Maritime AI™ company, to help pioneer the application of Generative AI to the maritime and ocean freight spheres. Some companies were excited to start talking about Gen AI following the Chat GPT explosion – we’ve been developing AI models since 2015. 

Vertical AI + Gen AI = full control. But you and your organization can evolve naturally by first focusing on a specific area/use case – risk mitigation. 

The Gradual Approach & Precise Use Cases

Windward recommends a gradual approach to adopting Gen AI. Scaling gradually allows companies to integrate it effectively, without overwhelming their existing systems. A strategic implementation of new technologies via a partnership with an industry leader is a best practice. 

To unlock Gen AI’s true potential, businesses must zero in on precise use cases. Organizations should identify exactly how AI can serve their unique needs. We are envisioning a world in which a Gen AI search engine agent could offer unparalleled access to unstructured data, enabling you to do much more with your data across the supply chain and global trade. 

As the ecosystem evolves, Gen AI conversations and implementations are expected to become more sophisticated, driving meaningful advances. Do you have good ideas about how generative AI could be utilized? Hit us up on social media and let us know!

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