Shipping has a habit of waiting for the next big thing before it acts on the last one.

The tools that would make a real difference to fuel bills and emissions are mostly in service already and mostly underused. What separates the operators getting results from the rest is not access to better technology but the discipline to act on what it tells them.

Progress in this industry is turning out to be less a matter of invention than of follow-through.

Offshore support fleets have spent years investing in fuel dashboards and performance reporting, yet Arnaud Dianoux's observation that many operators still run on spreadsheets says a great deal about where the industry actually stands. Visibility has been bought. Reduction has not necessarily followed.

That gap is the real problem. The offshore sector burns fuel in ways that rarely show up as a technical fault. Vessels wait for worksites that are not ready. Cargo schedules shift and priorities move. Crews respond in real time and the fleet drifts into what Dianoux calls emergency mode, with plans adjusted continuously and vessels sitting on standby longer than anyone intended. None of this is captured by a better sensor. It is captured only when someone looks at the pattern and changes a routine.

The stakes are higher offshore than in most shipping segments because the fuel transition is further away. Methanol, ammonia and hydrogen are not available at the scale, cost or readiness that support operations require, and the vessels doing this work will be doing it on conventional fuel for years. Regulators and charterers will not wait. That leaves operational optimisation as one of the few levers an owner can pull now, and the ADNOC L&S and Bourbon figures show the lever is not small.

What makes the Opsealog approach worth attention is its refusal to treat AI as a shortcut. Dianoux frames it as a co-pilot that must explain itself to crews and coordinators, and he is blunt that without clean data, shared definitions and human judgement it becomes another layer of noise. That is a more honest position than much of the industry's current marketing, and it points to where the difficult work sits: in benchmarking genuinely comparable vessels, in coordination between ship and shore, and in accepting that the most effective changes are often modest ones repeated across a fleet.

For shipowners, the question is not whether to collect more data. It is whether anyone is acting on what they already have.

Live this week: Can experience become an organisational asset?

Join Tomini Group Managing Director, Thomas Stjernholm and Janani Yagnamurthy, SVP of Product at Marcura in a live discussion to explore how AI can be used to capture and use knowledge that is otherwise trapped in the heads of the most experienced charterers.

A new chartering professional may need years to develop judgement. But the organisation around them may already hold decades of relevant experience.

In a discussion moderated by Nick Chubb, Marcura and Tomini Group will explore what it takes for AI to make that experience available across the business, how technology can support more consistent decision-making and where human judgement should remain central.

Join us on Wednesday 9th September for a 60-minute executive discussion and live audience Q&A.

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Shipping’s Digital Ambition Is Outpacing Its IT Maturity, with Steven Hemmings

Steve Hemmings joins Nick and Raal to examine why maritime IT maturity still lags other sectors, what shipping can learn from cruise and banking, and why cyber resilience, asset visibility, data architecture and change management matter. They also explore AI, legacy systems and the organisational foundations needed for meaningful digital transformation.

Thetius has narrowed more than 5,000 maritime organisations to 150 leading innovators, showing how shipowners are linking digital tools, data and operational decisions to improve fleet efficiency and cut emissions.