The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping maritime hiring, not by eliminating roles at scale, but by changing what skills are required. With digital tools increasingly embedded into operations, demand is quickly shifting towards data literacy, adaptability, and the ability to work within automated systems.

This trend has accelerated from the days of COVID-19, when McKinsey & Company predicted the pandemic would speed up digital breakthroughs by several years. Fast forward to today and the transformation has impacted everything from deep-sea mining, to ship design, navigation, weather forecasting, and port logistics. The question is increasingly whether this will require a new approach to recruitment and retention efforts, with new skills required to handle an evolving industry. 

It’s against this backdrop that maritime shipping businesses and stakeholders need to remain open-minded in talent acquisition strategies, according to Grant Allen, Technology Programme Manager/Principal Architect at Google, and Founder of technology training company Artifex Digital and Co-Founder of venture capital business One Vision Partners. 

“Maritime would be unwise to focus on a specific set of tools or processes,” he explained. “Instead, the industry needs to become comfortable with a level of ambiguity and stay abreast of evolving technology, particularly around digital transformation and the use of data and analytics. Traditional roles, such as navigation and engineering, will remain important but will simultaneously require an additional level of comfort in using and discussing data.”

Protecting maritime jobs of the future

In practice, this shift is less about how many people maritime employs, and more about what those roles look like. For Allen, this means the change in maritime will not be about replacing humans with AI solutions, but rather about the changing requirements of the workforce.

“Maritime is better positioned from a job safety perspective than some industries, because many roles are embedded in operations,” he said. “Someone will need to be on site to manage port logistics and shipping will continue to require skilled labour, for example.

“However, with more data-centric positions, we can expect a level of evolution, where there’s less emphasis on manual tasks and more on overseeing, orchestrating, and coordinating sophisticated AI tools, requiring judgment and expertise in managing these automated processes.”

For maritime employees, this could have the value of removing the burden of more tedious administrative tasks and enabling them to demonstrate their human creativity and expert judgement. 

“The growth of AI actually increases the emphasis on human creativity and expert judgment – tasks that require people to be ambitious and deal with ambiguity,” explained Allen. “Businesses will be looking to accelerate and multiply what their personnel can do through new technologies and tools but this shouldn’t diminish the value of seasoned professionals.”

This view is shared by Emma Cranie, Managing Director of maritime specialist recruitment agency Elite Consult, who notes that even where job titles stay the same, the duties and required skills will change significantly. 

“The nature of roles in maritime is shifting rapidly,” she said. “The ability to use AI-generated information to improve performance is increasingly a baseline requirement, while anything that is routine and repeatable is likely to be automated. We can anticipate significant changes in the back office in particular, encompassing everything from electronic bills of lading to warehouse robotics.” 

Evolution of roles

However, these changes also raise longer-term questions about how the industry develops its future workforce. This evolution of roles will also need to consider junior talent in order to build the maritime industry of the future, Allen explained. “While using AI tools instead of hiring juniors might be a seductive proposition for some businesses, junior hires represent the future mid-tier and senior experts. Maritime should respond to disruption through considered career pathways that are resilient to the changes taking place.”

Cranie further also noted that maritime needs to ensure AI doesn’t harm the talent pipeline while simultaneously ensuring these solutions aren’t automatically excluding qualified candidates who haven’t optimised their CVs with certain keywords. 

“There is clearly a risk to succession planning if maritime begins outsourcing all entry-level and junior work to AI,” she said. “But there’s also a risk that talented young people will be excluded through the misuse of AI when assessing applicants, with talented candidates overlooked when businesses outsource CV reviewing to ATS software.”

AI for talent development

While some of the discussion focuses on risk, there is also a growing emphasis on how AI can support workforce development. Alongside ensuring AI isn’t used to replace people, maritime businesses should also consider how new technologies, including AI, can be deployed in order to upskill the human workforce, according to Cranie. This, she noted, is all the more important given that many of maritime’s major challenges can only be solved by humans. 

“AI can be a really effective training tool that we should be harnessing to upskill workers rather than replace them,” she said. “We live in a time when many of the major challenges we face are political, financial and human-centric – including global conflict, geopolitical tension and uncertainty around trade routes – solving these can’t be outsourced to an algorithm.” 

Seizing advantages 

Despite cautioning against AI being used in the wrong contexts and noting that new technologies won’t solve many of maritime’s most pressing challenges, Cranie does envisage significant opportunities for businesses correctly harnessing the technology. 

“While AI isn’t a silver bullet, it could prove extremely significant, unlocking real-time decision making based on live data and offering new levels of accuracy when it comes to data entry, compliance, and predictive maintenance,” said Cranie. 

Allen also expects more sophisticated players in maritime to gain a significant competitive advantage through realising the potential of AI. “Maritime businesses that embrace the data-centric nature of their organisation and the new landscape will significantly reduce the time required to carry out administrative tasks – processes that currently take a week will only require a day, while those tasks that take a day will be completed in an hour,” he said.

In some ways, realising this potential and responding to the disruption of AI is part of a long tradition within maritime, in which businesses need to adapt to new landscapes to succeed. “In maritime’s long history, the businesses that stand the test of time are the ones that respond to change in order to operate in the new reality without being rigidly attached to old ways of working,” Allen concluded. “ AI is simply the latest example.”