Geopolitical tensions, technological shifts, and supply chain volatility are persistent challenges, forcing organizations to rethink their strategies. But with every challenge comes opportunity. Based on insights from Windward’s 2025 Top Trends in Global Trade report, this blog post explores how those who can anticipate and adapt to disruptions – whether due to shifting trade routes,...
The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has issued sweeping sanctions against over 180 vessels and 170 companies connected to Russian energy exports, shadow fleet operations, maritime insurance, and oilfield services. These actions are part of a broader effort to disrupt Russia’s revenue streams and target networks that enable sanctions evasion. The implications...
Executive brief #3 From AIS screening to behavior analysis
What’s inside?
The Automatic Identification System (AIS) has profoundly changed our understanding of what is happening at sea, providing a deeper understanding of where ships are and where they are headed at all times. However, what AIS does not answer is: What is the ship doing? Why is it doing that? What is its importance?
A skilled analyst can answer that question, however, they may require hours or even days to do so. With the rise of false positives, this means transactions would slow down significantly, transforming compliance risks into operational risks.
Training artificial intelligence algorithms to conduct expert shipping analysis automatically speeds-up vessel due diligence processes and provides compliance professionals with always up-to-date recommendations. Such automation helps minimize false positives and maintain existing compliance frameworks and controls without needing additional domain experts.
Key takeaways
AIS manipulations and sanctions evasion – Behavior analysis can shed light on the context of questionable activities at sea, generating valuable insights that can support decision making.
Behavior analysis: The case of the Pacific Bravo – To determine whether or not a vessel was evading sanctions requires deep domain knowledge, expertise in sanctions evasion typologies, and above all, time.
Scale up behavior analysis with artificial intelligence (AI) – Integrating advanced AI capabilities into vessel due diligence enables automatic clearance of low-risk events and flags suspicious patterns of behavior.
Download the full brief
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By Irit Singer, Chief Marketing Officer, Windward 2022 was the year that the maritime ecosystem collectively realized that there is simply too much raw data for manual parsing and the landscape changes too rapidly. The world seemed to go crazy: Coronavirus and closures…war, sanctions, and a price cap…new deceptive shipping practices…plummeting ocean freight prices and...