Recorded live at the Digital Ships Summit in Athens, Nick Chubb and Raal Harris debate whether shipping should prioritise efficiency or resilience as AI reshapes technology decisions.

From vendor dependence and workforce skills to governance and boardroom accountability, they ask how operators can embrace automation without surrendering control or flexibility.

CHAPTERS

• 00:20 IT's move from support to strategy
• 04:50 Episode partner: trusted fleet data
• 05:33 Efficiency or resilience?
• 09:42 Vendor lock-in and skills fade
• 15:14 Transforming organisations for AI
• 17:10 Leadership and AI governance
• 21:55 Measuring returns and building capability
• 27:11 Audience: data risks and shadow AI
• 32:29 Digital twins and human resilience

Live at the Digital Ships Summit in Athens, Nick and Raal begin with IT's move from back-office support to strategic decision-maker. What should shipping prioritise as technology becomes more central to operations?

Raal argues resilience must take priority over efficiency. Geopolitical disruption, recovery planning, vendor lock-in and skills fade can make efficient technology choices dangerously brittle. Nick calls this a false choice: resilience is unavoidable, while the bigger decision is how organisations transform for AI.

That requires informed leadership, practical governance, measurable returns and capabilities beyond IT. The audience confronts shadow AI, sensitive data and digital twins built from decades of institutional knowledge. They finish by considering how technology transformation can strengthen resilience rather than undermine it.

EPISODE PARTNER

Better decisions start with better data. But across maritime, fleet data is still fragmented, inconsistently standardised and uneven in quality.

A weak data foundation leads to unreliable decisions. The same is true for AI and analytics: they're only as good as the data they're fed. That's why getting the fundamentals right — data standards, structure and governance — has to come before scaling innovation.

When leaders trust the data, they move faster, invest with more confidence and turn digital ambition into measurable outcomes. Build trusted data foundations with insight. Follow the link in the episode description. Discover data solutions from Insight.