Norway-based maritime technology business, Shipnet has launched Helix AI ahead of attending Sea Asia in Singapore next week, further strengthening its revolutionary Helix product, designed to transform decision-making in the shipping industry through advanced data analysis.

Helix, launched at Posidonia in 2024, provides a digital representation of your shipping business, enabling seamless integration and analysis of data from various sources such as safety, pricing, and procurement. By leveraging these diverse data inputs, Helix uncovers actionable insights to enhance business operations.

Niall Jack, Director of Product Management said at the launch: “We always had the ambition for AI to form an important part of the Helix offering and have been working on training our AI models. Validating and thoroughly testing them has taken time but we now have the critical mass of historic data to be able to deploy trained and accurate models.

“Helix itself is really a data warehouse and the machine learning part of the project which sits with Shipnet helps us develop insights we can feed back to our customers to allow them to really drive and optimise their work. The AI models we are developing allow us to use the data on the Helix platform, to provide validations, recommendations and optimisations to our customers while continuously improving the quality of information they are feeding in through the feedback mechanisms our AI Models have.

“The key differentiator for ‘AI’ here, is that it allows us to provide these validations and optimisations in real time – there are no extensive algorithms and lookups, nor extensive rule sets that need to be configured by customers – we use their historic behaviours to keep the future actions in line.”

Established in 1991 and headquartered in Oslo, Shipnet has a legacy of addressing industry challenges with its integrated vessel management software, trusted by over 150 businesses in 31 countries. Its expertise in integrated vessel management software allows businesses to see the bigger picture combining technical, commercial, financial and analytical operations together.

In line with the broader shipping industry, Shipnet sees customers eager to control their costs and this often means reductions in manpower for shore teams and increased workloads. Software helps them handle this, but the use of AI allows them to offload some of that workload to Helix – automating workflows, populating orders, requisitions and commercial documents with high quality information all without human intervention.

Niall continued: “A significant focus is now on using Helix and the AI models to drive our service offering. We want to work closely with customers to fully understand the challenges they are facing and demonstrate how Helix and the data gathered can provide solutions to their business problems.

“With Helix, we can completely change the way that we have offered services in the past and adopt new technology as it emerges, hyper-customise the service and insight that customers can receive – all whilst reducing the amount of work they need to do. As the capability of AI tooling improves, I expect we will begin to see natural language querying of Helix data – the ability to ask Helix to provide a summary of safety related incidents across the fleet for example, and you will get a structured report – complete with graphs, diagrams and quotations – all generated in seconds by AI.”

John Wills, Head of Customer Experience at Shipnet said: “It’s not uncommon for businesses in the shipping industry to suffer as a result of insufficient data and our simplicity, transparency and ability to connect different business areas gives the most informed decision making. Our analytical capabilities with the launch of Helix AI will ultimately transform your business by funnelling your data into Helix, giving the opportunity to find out how your business is performing.”