AiatSea: How to Give an AI Agent Its First Job

Here is a number from this week that surprised a lot of people. Uber handled about 320 million rides and food orders in Halloween week, its busiest week of October. AI agents booked four of the rides, and about 500 food orders. Its finance chief called it "very early". DoorDash reports only a few hundred orders from agents so far.

Our reading. This does not mean agents do not work. Story 1 shows one doing useful work on a real voyage. We think the reason is simpler: most people do not yet know what an agent is, or how to give one a job. Nobody showed them. That is true in shipping offices too.

The difference between a chatbot and an agent. A chatbot waits for your question. An agent has a job. It watches something, notices a change, prepares the next step, and asks you before anything important happens. ZeroNorth's agent watched a voyage for 16 days and spoke up three times. Ubotica's satellite saw a ship and planned its own next photo. That is the idea.

Five steps to give an AI agent its first job. One: pick one boring job that repeats every day or every week, such as checking noon reports, watching fuel against plan, or comparing a supplier's invoice with the order. Two: write down what the agent may do alone, such as read, compare and warn, and what always needs a person's yes, such as send, order, pay or change a route. Three: write down today's number for that job: hours per week, errors per month, or problems found late. Story 2 shows that almost nobody does this. Four: let the agent run beside the person who does the job now, for one month, without replacing anyone. Five: after the month, sit down with that person and count. What did the agent catch? What did it get wrong? Did it save time or add work?

Two rules from this week. From story 5: give the agent hard limits it can never cross. From story 7: when the answer matters, check where it came from.

Our view. Agents will not arrive in shipping as one big system. They will arrive one small job at a time. The companies that learn how to give an agent a job, and how to check it, will be ready when the bigger tools come. The first job can start this month. [Maritime Innovations · FourWeekMBA · Uber · AiatSea, 4 October]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 8 November 2026.