The Camera Argument Gets an Answer, and the Answer Has Numbers in It

Last week we led with a serving Maersk master mariner, Alex Byelyavtsev, arguing that an AI camera detects behaviour but cannot measure safety culture. On 2 September Osher Perry, founder and chief executive of ShipIn, published a reply on the same site and named the article he was answering.

He concedes the camera point. "A camera is only a sensor," he writes. His argument is that the value appears when visual data is combined with operational data, vessel status and history, so you see a pattern rather than an event.

Then he does the thing nobody in this category had done. He publishes figures. Across roughly 600 vessels, 29% of the ships accounted for 70% of the accidents. Ships scoring below 75 on ShipIn's safety score had 5.7 times the accident rate of ships scoring above 85. And deployments show safety deviations falling from around 230 to 8 per vessel per month, which he puts at a 96% reduction.

In the same week the company converted to a Public Benefit Corporation. That means the safety mission is written into the corporate charter, and the company now has a legal duty to publish an annual report on how it performed against it.

Now the honest part, because we asked for this data and we do not get to only like it.

The 96% figure is deviations detected. That number falls when crews adapt to the camera. It is exactly the measurement Byelyavtsev warned about. The 5.7 times figure uses ShipIn's own score to predict accidents, which is the company grading its own grading system. None of it is audited and no method has been published. And a Public Benefit Corporation is a promise about reporting, not a result.

So the fair summary is this. A vendor was challenged in public and answered in public with real numbers, which is more than the rest of this industry has managed. The numbers are not yet the kind you can rely on. Ask for the next annual report. That is the one that counts. [Splash247 · Smart Maritime Network]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 6 September 2026.