Having Team Members who are smarter than you are can be hard. It requires humility and a key sense of your limitations.

But it opens up huge potential and is infinitely preferable to the alternative.

SeaGPT for Chartering is the most brilliant Assistant you have ever had.

Imagine your own AI Co-Pilot, trained on your Voyage Data, Market Reports, and Charter-Parties.

SeaGPT can review every transaction you or your company has ever done, every market report you have ever received, and every charter party you ever signed, to give you insight and analysis in seconds.

Generative AI may not have all the attributes of a Chartering Assistant, but there are some things it can do in seconds. And mostly, what it can do in seconds is pull any data on any deal you have ever done to give you the situational awareness you need to make the next deal.

Talk to Your Voyage Management System

Firstly, SeaGPT plugs into your Voyage Management System data, and you can ask it questions like you’d ask a colleague. Do you prefer talking to SeaGPT in Japanese or even Greek? No problem; SeaGPT supports over 40 different languages.

Let's consider some scenarios.

If you need to know how much business you did with a counter-party last year, simply ask SeaGPT, and it will let you know how many voyages you did, the volume, type of cargo and even the total TCE earnings you generated from that customer.

If you are thinking about how to price your freight, no worries. Ask SeaGPT, and it can give you similar freight rates on similar cargoes your team are quoting, what you quoted for the same cargo and same charterer last year or even what the lowest and highest freight rates you charged that customer was.

How is the company’s month, year or quarter going? Just ask SeaGPT for your team members' average and total earnings, and it will break down a clear-cut, straightforward report on how things are going. If you have a short-notice meeting with one of your team in 5 minutes, you can have all of the latest data at your fingertips.

Just ask.

Query Charter-Parties

Secondly, SeaGPT can ingest Charter-Parties. You can inquire about uncommon clauses or unreasonable terms that we have in recent charter parties that you negotiated with a counterparty. You can also easily navigate data in charter parties if you need to query specific clauses.

Imagine being able to ask SeaGPT;

“Can you let me know what out-of-the-ordinary clauses I had with XXX charterer when we last did a deal?”

SeaGPT will give you the data straight back.

Turn Market Reports from Text into Tactical Advantage

The other heavy lifting that we are helping customers out with is turning market reports into market intelligence.

It is tough - our customers might be receiving 15-20 reports a month and some of these are updated even more frequently.

The challenge is, firstly, reading the reports. Secondly, its to have the data in the reports on hand when you need to make a decision. SeaGPT can ingest all of the market reports for you, give you detailed (or not) summaries and answer ad-hoc questions when you need an insight on the markets.

We have even had clients on demo ask SeaGPT, on the basis of Market reports:

“Where is the best place to reposition my vessel for the most lucrative cargo in week 6 of 2024?”

SeaGPT will tell you the answer. And it will justify its thinking with evidence from the market reports you ingested.

Customers tell us they value two key outcomes from SeaGPT.

First, is by helping them avoid mistakes. Their key deliverable is to minimise unforced errors, as often what impact performance is not the average trade. It is the unseen catastrophe that the Chartering Team spends the rest of the month or quarter, trying to set right.

Second, is to improve their ability to take risks.

“If I can ask my VMS, a few simple questions and get the data straight back, I know I can take more informed risks.”

This is something we hear time and again from people working in the front line of Chartering. There is a complete inability to rapidly surface critical intelligence that they need to mitigate the uncertainty around taking high risk, higher reward decisions.

There is nothing worse than knowing that you had the data you need to mitigate a risk. But that you could not surface it in time to help evaluate a charter opportunity before you had to make a decision.

I’ll say it again. Many of our customers tell that they are sat on top of game changing data in their Voyage Management Systems, that they are unable to rapidly turn into actionable intelligence.

They feel powerless and frustrated.

Greywing’s SeaGPT, cuts through the inaccessibility of reports and user interfaces to deliver answers, in just a little more time than it takes you, to just ask the question.

The Largest Players are Exploring Generative AI Now

Some people have commented that the technology that we are building is on the bleeding edge of what is possible in Generative AI.

A lot of what we are working on is commercially sensitive, so I cannot go into it too much, but we have integrated customers with three of the leading Voyage Management Systems. Our customers are in dry bulk, project cargo and chemicals. If your vessels trade on the spot market, we can help you improve your relationship with your data.

Final thoughts on hiring Generative AI as your team member

Some of the largest players in the industry have already begun to develop internal teams to deliver this outcome. We believe that this will bottom out initially as their approach is likely to involve connecting to an OpenAI Chat-GPT API and hoping for the best.

In all honesty, I think that in the end, they will need a specialist technical unit like Greywing to enable them to truly deliver the capability they are imagining, and for us their interest, demonstrates how compelling this technology is.

In the discussions we have had with the Leaders in the industry, they expressed the belief that that the defining characteristic of a successful commercial operator in the coming years will have more to do with their approach to leveraging data using AI than anything else.

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