The U.S. Coast Guard has long contended with personnel shortages. Over a year ago, one of its leaders outlined the issue:
“The maritime force is operating with a deficit of about 4,800 members, or nearly 10% of its workforce, and anticipates an even larger shortfall this year due to struggles with recruiting, said Vice Adm. Paul Thomas, deputy commandant for mission support for the Coast Guard.”
More recently, the Trump administration moved to terminate more than 400 employees at the Department of Homeland Security and the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, as part of efforts to significantly reduce the federal workforce.
This phenomenon is not confined to the U.S. Government agencies around the world are seeing a reduction in their workforces.
Agency members with decades of experience are being encouraged to retire early, or being let go, in many cases. How can the remaining experts continue to function effectively with significantly fewer people trying to tackle the same amount of work, despite the reduction in hands and minds, and the inevitable loss of domain knowledge?
Generative AI can help in two critical ways…
Gen AI Helps Gov Agencies Stay Afloat
The recent cuts by the Department of Governmental Enforcement (DOGE) have affected government agencies in America. Agencies in other countries are facing their own staffing issues.
With fewer personnel to handle the same volume of work – or in many cases, even more – agencies are left struggling to maintain operational efficiency.
In this high-stakes environment, the question isn’t just how to fill empty seats, but how to empower the high-quality people who remain on the team and need to meet the same critical responsibilities, without dropping the ball. The answer lies in Generative AI (Gen AI), which offers two major solutions:
- Automating time-consuming, repetitive tasks that aren’t high value, to free up personnel to work on mission-critical tasks
- Amplifying existing expertise
Automating Repetitive Tasks: Enhanced Productivity Without Expanded Headcount
Government agencies handle a relentless influx of data, reports, and communications. Analysts can spend countless hours manually screening vessels, compiling intelligence briefings, drafting reports, and searching for specific deceptive shipping practices (DSPs) associated with illicit activities:
- Drug smuggling
- Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing
- Sanctions evasions
These necessary but time-consuming tasks take up bandwidth that could otherwise be devoted to high-level analysis and strategic decision-making. However, they cannot be handed off to a generic AI bot, as they still require a degree of domain expertise.
Gen AI that is based on prompts engineered by maritime domain experts – and which draws upon accurate, verified, and processed maritime data – changes this equation by streamlining administrative workloads. Instead of spending hours compiling maritime risk reports, analysts can rely on Gen AI to pull relevant data from multiple sources and generate structured, digestible summaries in minutes.
Vessel screenings, once a labor-intensive process, can now be handled more efficiently with AI flagging anomalies and surfacing key insights for human review. Even the back-and-forth of drafting routine communications can be automated, ensuring consistency, while freeing up analysts to focus on what truly matters.
By shifting the burden of repetitive tasks to AI, government agencies can reclaim valuable time and ensure that their leaner teams are directing their expertise where it counts.
Amplifying Existing Expertise
While automation solves one part of the equation, the loss of personnel presents another challenge: how to bridge the knowledge gap and account for the reduction in expertise across the agency. Maritime enforcement is an expertise-driven field, requiring analysts to interpret complex vessel behaviors, understand potential risks, and assess evolving threats.
Further complicating the picture, risk and threats are quickly changing and expanding, and analysts cannot be experts regarding all types of activities, patterns, and regions, especially on subjects currently outside of their main area of focus.
Gen AI accelerates this learning curve. Instead of relying on human experience and accumulated knowledge, analysts can now access AI-powered insights in real time. AI acts as an on-demand maritime expert, instantly providing historical context, regulatory guidance, and intelligence summaries that help junior and senior team members make informed decisions.
Rather than sifting through vast amounts of raw data, they can quickly surface only the most relevant insights – turning data into actionable intelligence without the steep learning curve. Gen AI’s explainability helps foster understanding and communicate new insights effectively.
Windward’s MAI Expert™ is a Force Multiplier
The current challenges facing government maritime agencies demand an intelligent solution. Windward’s MAI Expert™ was designed for times like this. As the first Gen AI-powered maritime risk subject matter expert, MAI Expert™ seamlessly integrates into analysts’ daily workflows, automating time-consuming tasks, while enhancing risk analysis with AI-driven insights.
By handling vessel screening, generating intelligence summaries, and drafting communications, MAI Expert™ allows analysts to focus on mission-critical decisions. More than just an efficiency tool, it serves as an always-available maritime expert, providing instant domain knowledge and supplementing the experts trying to do what was previously the work of many.
In a world where fewer people are being asked to address new and evolving threats that require multiple expertise domains to effectively mitigate, MAI Expert™ isn’t just a tool – it’s a force multiplier that ensures agencies can remain proactive, resilient, and effective.
Resources are shrinking and the demands of enforcement and security are only increasing. The future belongs to those who embrace AI-driven solutions, and with MAI Expert™, agencies don’t have to just keep up – they can actually get ahead.
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