Veson Nautical brought together more than 200 of Asia’s most innovative maritime leaders last week to discuss some of today’s biggest market trends, including how AI is shaping the future of maritime and how companies are leveraging it to boost productivity and tackle tough challenges.
Attendees had the chance to hear from Veson experts, senior executives, and industry leaders about how they’re using Veson’s unified platform to navigate compounding complexities in an increasingly volatile maritime market.
“Three things enable you to create your decision advantage. Agility—flexible workflows that adapt to how you work; context — integrated, high integrity data; and collaboration— the ability to work internally and externally efficiently with the tools and data that you have,” Chief Operating Officer Sean Riley said during his keynote remarks.
It was a packed day of sessions that explored the latest in Veson’s IMOS and Shipfix products, as well as the company’s data solutions and AI capabilities offered in IMOS X CoCaptain. Experts and executives also discussed the state of the Asian shipowner market and how stakeholders are navigating both a push to decarbonize and rapidly changing geopolitical forces.
Here’s a breakdown of the day, with key takeaways from each session.
The Veson Vision: Leveraging Data, Collaboration, and AI for a Decision Advantage
Chief Operating Officer Sean Riley and Chief Product Officer Eric Christofferson offered an in-depth look at how Veson is thoughtfully integrating AI into its solutions, using it as a tool to stay ahead in a fast-changing market.
“What we want to do is free up your time so that you can spend more of it on human interactions and working with teammates on complex and highly strategic, high value work,” Christofferson said. “We are fortunate to have solutions that enable workflows across the entire voyage lifecycle and we think that AI has a place in almost every, if not all, of our products and solutions.”
Key Takeaways:
- Cybersecurity threats, geopolitical disruptions, changing customer expectations, and rising costs all threaten to undermine companies’ growth.
- Veson’s open, trusted platform can help companies navigate these complexities and create a decision advantage built on agile workflows, contextualized data, and efficient collaboration offered through a native workflow connection.
- Quality AI is driven by quality data—that’s why Veson prides itself on its multisource data platform that validates and ensures clean, contextualized information.
Shipfix & IMOS: Unifying Pre- and Post-Fixture Workflows
Veson’s APAC Director of Account Management Capt. Avneet Singh showcased how Shipfix and IMOS can streamline clients’ end-to-end fixture process, including the native connection between the two solutions that enhances collaboration across chartering and operations teams.
Key Takeaways:
- Maritime organizations say their current digital solutions are ineffective at supporting internal collaboration and making contextualized, data-driven decisions.
- This inefficiency leads to missed market opportunities and slower decision making. Shipfix helps solve this issue by streamlining the process as chartering teams move from an email or market opportunity to an estimate.
- Shipfix and IMOS boost efficiency in the estimation process and expedite the transition from pre- to post-fixture workflows, giving teams more time to focus on relationship-building and critical decision making.
Market Insights: The Changing Landscape of Asian Shipping
VP of Valuation and Analytics Matt Freeman offered a look at the state of the Asian shipowner market, highlighting how shifting economic and geopolitical forces are impacting S&P strategies.
Key Takeaways:
- The Russia-Ukraine war has impacted the global flow of crude oil, splitting tanker markets into mainstream and dark fleet systems.
- China’s role as a dominant market force is driven in part by the country’s state-backed leasing system, which allows companies to operate on longer investment horizons. Japanese and South Korean firms, meanwhile, can’t afford to buy vessels that may sit idle for months during a market downturn.
- Amid market volatility, Discounted Cash Flow modeling can be used to ground investment decisions in a vessel’s underlying earnings potential. By basing decisions on cash generation potential rather than sentiment, DCF provides stakeholders with a disciplined framework to navigate volatile cycles.
IMOS X Claims CoCaptain: AI-Powered Claims Management
AI is transforming how teams tackle claims management, eliminating repetitive manual tasks and document gathering. Senior Solutions Consultant Greg Andrle discussed how Veson’s Claims CoCaptain AI tool helps streamline the claims management process and gives teams more time to focus on critical strategic priorities.
Key Takeaways:
- Analysts spend 70% of their time on tedious claim tasks. CoCaptain cuts down on this work, making sense of the many long email threads, disorganized files, and manual document reviews that occur throughout the claims process.
- CoCaptain can generate a suggested claim or update existing claims, ready it for processing, and negotiate and settle the claim, all on the IMOs platform.
- CoCaptain makes it easier to monitor team productivity and progress by consolidating claims viewing and tracking into one place.
IMOS X Connect: A Better Way to Collaborate
CPO Eric Christofferson illustrated the power of IMOS X Connect and how it offers a new way to bridge the communication gap between operators and their counterparties with a central platform that unlocks deeper real-time visibility into data and voyage updates.
Key Takeaways:
- Connect offers real-time cargo and voyage sharing that eliminates manual updates and streamlines communications between operators and counterparties.
- The solution aims to tackle one of the biggest market challenges—the quickly evolving state of customer expectations—by centralizing and simplifying communication flow.
- Connect lays the foundation for broader collaboration and visibility across the value chain, as Veson explores how to optimize commodity analytics, vessel nomination, and vetting workflows in a collaborative manner.
From Data to Decisions: Context When it Counts
Contextualized data where you need it when you need it can make the difference between merely keeping up in a dynamic market or setting the pace. Christofferson offered insight into how Veson is helping clients harness data and how strategic analytics can transform everyday decisions into market opportunities.
Key Takeaways:
- Vessel Reference Data provides a single source of truth for vessel data, including a description of the vessel, operational metrics, machinery details, and ownership information.
- There’s more maritime data available than ever before—what makes the difference for Veson clients is having access to quality, contextualized data within existing workflows.
- Veson’s Data Lake is designed to provide clients continuous access to their IMOS data, as well as to enable new and innovative ways to interact with and use that information.
An Executive Conversation: Leading in Today’s Maritime Climate
The day ended with a dynamic panel between some of today’s top maritime executives, moderated by COO Sean Riley. Panelists included Veson CEO John Veson, BHP Head of Maritime Safety, Sustainability & Technical Ashima Taneja, IMC Director & Group Head of Operations Capt. Venkatesh Dutt, and Wah Kwong Maritime Services Luigi Cafiero.
The group discussed how they are approaching today’s biggest geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges, and how AI is helping them stay ahead in a volatile market.
Curious about our upcoming events? Explore what’s next at Veson and save the date for opportunities to connect with your peers at veson.com/events.
Eric Christofferson
Carl Schlehr
Sean Riley