AiatSea: Who Decides When a Machine May Come In?

Read this week's stories again as one question. A machine stood at a door, and somebody had to decide.

Four doors, four answers. Petrobras opened the door a little: come on board, stand on deck, let us look. United Airlines closed it: no outside agents until there is a safe, agreed way in. Korea's safety authority opened it with a stamp: tested on a car ferry first, then approved for passengers. And GXO opened it with conditions: every job must pass agreed targets before the next step.

None of these is wrong. They fit different risks. A robot standing on a deck in port hurts nobody. An agent holding your password can spend your money. A ferry carries people. What is wrong is the fifth answer, the one most companies give without noticing: nobody decides. The tool simply arrives. A crew member installs an app. An office worker gives an assistant a password. A supplier switches on an AI feature in an update.

The Microsoft outage shows the cost of not deciding. Many offices never chose to put their AI assistant on the same account as their email. It came with the licence. This week both stopped together.

Five questions to answer before a robot or an agent reaches you. One: who in the company can say yes? Give it a name, not a department. Two: what exactly may it do, and what may it never do without a person? Write both lists. Three: what must it pass first? One task, one number, as in story 2. Four: what happens when it stops working, or when the link is down, as in stories 4 and 6? Five: whose door is it really? If the machine will log in to someone else's portal, as in story 3, the answer is theirs to give, not yours.

Our view. We like what Petrobras did. It is better to look early than to be surprised later. But a look is only a start. The companies that will use robots and agents well are not the first to let them in. They are the ones that know who decided, what was allowed and how it was tested. That takes one page of paper, and you can write it before the machine arrives. [Solstad · Skift · AiatSea, 8 November]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 15 November 2026.