January 27, 2026
Six Essential Takeaways from the 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy for Maritime Leaders
Windward Early Detection is a groundbreaking, AI-based solution that acts like a crystal ball, providing a consistent view of world events that may disrupt supply chains, impact global trade, or threaten security.
Powered by MAI Expert™, our generative AI virtual analyst, Early Detection identifies critical anomalies and delivers open-source context, clear explanations, and actionable insights.
Early Detection enables organizations to passively identify anomalies and emerging trends by continuously analyzing Windward’s proprietary data alongside open-source intelligence, uncovering behavioral outliers that traditional systems miss. Powered by MAI Expert™, it transforms complex signals into clear, industry-specific insights and actionable recommendations.
Receive early warnings automatically, before anyone else, for major disruptions and potential threats. Windward’s vast and exclusive datasets are integrated with multiple open-source data streams, such as news, extreme weather reports, and social media.
Gain insight into behavioral outliers, new risk profiles, targets, and emerging trends in real-time, enabling effective and informed strategic planning.
Whether you require global coverage or a specific regional focus, Windward’s Early Detection adapts to your operational priorities and needs, providing continuous tracking of vessel movements.
Accelerate your path to actionable intelligence with high-quality, previously unknown leads – with no user input required. Gain near-real-time insights into anomalies and trend shifts that may signal critical geopolitical events or military activities, directly impacting national security. Whether your focus is on a single region or the entire world, our model instantly identifies targets that reveal both sudden disruptions and gradual transformations, keeping you ahead and on top of emerging threats.
From weather conditions to port congestion, you can react swiftly to emerging disruptions before they escalate, and ensure smooth operations. By continuously monitoring trade routes and vessel behavior, Windward enables you to minimize vulnerabilities and maintain uninterrupted, secure trade flow, safeguarding your business from unforeseen events.
Uncover emerging market shifts and evolving trade patterns with real-time monitoring of global vessel movements. Identify new operational hubs and growth opportunities. This foresight allows traders, shipping, and bunkering companies to capitalize on trends ahead of competitors, receive recommendations for action, and optimize their strategies to thrive in a rapidly changing global landscape.
Windward’s Maritime AI™ platform aggregates over a decade of proprietary behavioral and historical data to forecast expected values and flag anomalies. Our data is the differentiator – accurate, clean, and processed, based on 13 years of continuous global coverage.
With the integration of new data sources – such as news, social media, and unstructured data – Windward now provides even deeper insights. Coupled with our Gen AI capabilities, we empower customers to detect and solve challenges at scale, helping transform data into predictive, actionable intelligence.
What is Windward’s Early Detection solution?
Windward’s Early Detection is a continuous intelligence capability that automatically surfaces behavioral anomalies and emerging patterns across global maritime activity. By scanning Windward’s proprietary behavioral data alongside open-source signals, it identifies early indicators of disruption, risk, or strategic change, generating intelligence leads before they become visible through traditional monitoring or alerts.
What types of anomalies does Early Detection surface?
Early Detection surfaces deviations from expected maritime behavior, including dark activity, port calls, abnormal loitering, course changes, unusual ship-to-ship activity, and sudden regional pattern shifts. These anomalies often indicate emerging operational, compliance, security, or geopolitical risk before intent is fully visible.
How is Early Detection different from alerts or traditional monitoring systems?
Traditional systems monitor predefined conditions or known risks. Early Detection works differently by continuously analyzing global maritime behavior to identify unknown anomalies and trend shifts without requiring predefined rules, queries, or watchlists. This allows organizations to detect emerging risks they were not actively looking for, rather than only tracking what is already known.
How does Windward detect anomalies earlier than traditional approaches?
Early Detection is powered by Windward’s proprietary behavioral AI models, which forecast expected vessel behavior and flag deviations at scale. These models run continuously across global maritime data and are enriched with open-source context, allowing subtle changes in behavior or regional patterns to be identified before they escalate into visible incidents.
How do users understand what an anomaly means and whether it matters to them?
Each Early Detection signal is accompanied by a contextual explanation, including the behaviors involved, historical baselines, and why the anomaly is unusual. Relevant open-source intelligence (OSINT), such as news, weather events, or reported incidents, is automatically correlated where available to provide external context. MAI Expert™ provides structured summaries and potential implications, helping users quickly assess relevance and decide whether to investigate further, monitor, or take action.
How does MAI Expert™ support Early Detection, and what are the limitations?
MAI Expert™ assists users by summarizing anomalies, highlighting relevant behavioral and operational context, and incorporating correlated OSINT signals to help explain what may be driving an event. It suggests investigative directions based on Windward’s data and models. As a Gen AI-powered assistant, its outputs are intended to support human analysis, not replace it, and should be reviewed alongside underlying data and operational judgment before decisions are made.
How does Early Detection connect to investigations and operational response?
Early Detection generates intelligence leads that flow directly into Windward’s investigation and operational workflows. Users can pivot from a detected anomaly into vessel screening, advanced search, Visual Link Analysis, remote sensing tasking, and case management, enabling a seamless path from early signal to verification and action.
Can Early Detection support geopolitical, military, or strategic risk monitoring?
Yes. By identifying regional behavioral shifts, coordinated activity, and changes in operational patterns, Early Detection supports monitoring of geopolitical tension, military posturing, sanctions dynamics, and strategic maritime developments that may impact national security or global trade.
Which teams and industries use Early Detection?
Early Detection is used by government, defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies, as well as trading, shipping, logistics, insurance, and energy organizations. Any team that needs early awareness of maritime disruption, emerging risk, or strategic change benefits from its passive, continuous intelligence.
Does Early Detection include historical analysis and trend validation?
Yes. Users can review historical anomalies and long-term behavioral trends to identify recurring patterns, validate emerging risks, and support forward-looking assessments with historical context.
How is Early Detection used alongside Remote Sensing Intelligence?
Early Detection often serves as the trigger for targeted remote sensing. When behavioral anomalies surface, users can task satellite imagery or analyze archived EO, SAR, or RF data to visually verify activity, confirm attribution, and strengthen intelligence with independent evidence.
