A Hundred Ships of AI Watchkeeping, and the Part Nobody Expected

Torsten Pedersen runs ship management for CMA CGM's owned fleet. Before that he was at Seaspan, where he took the Orca AI watchkeeping-assist system from small trials to a 100-ship implementation. This week he described, in public, what his team actually did with it.

They did not monitor everything. They pointed the system at arrival and departure, the phases where an error costs the most. They analysed manoeuvring patterns in detail and fed that back to their captains. They saw what Pedersen calls immediate safety improvements. They also identified and formally recognised the captains who performed exceptionally well, which is the opposite of how most crews expect camera data to be used.

Then came the part that will interest superintendents most. Some of the risk patterns in the data were not driven by the ship's crew at all. They were driven by pilot decisions. The detailed record turned into an entry point for fact-based conversations with local pilots about how to make those movements safer. That is a genuinely new use of this technology, and we have not seen another operator describe it.

Pedersen is blunt about the limits. The technology does not substitute for good people. His words: if you crew your vessels with people content simply to be on board, you will get nothing out of it. Orca AI chief executive Yarden Gross made the same point, comparing it to aviation, where automation removes repetitive load and the human stays in the loop.

Our caveat, and it is not small. The article is headlined on real-world test data and then publishes no numbers. "Immediate safety improvements" is the only outcome claim in it. The photograph is supplied by the vendor. We have now asked four weeks running for a published incident figure from this product category, and the count is still zero. [Maritime Executive]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 13 September 2026.