Op-Ed: From paper to AI—Shipping’s safety track record and the gap that data can close

Esa Henttinen, Executive Vice President for Safety Solutions at NAPA

Shipping has made genuine progress on safety. According to the Allianz Safety and Shipping Review 2025, total vessel losses have fallen by 75% over the past decade, from 105 in 2015 to a record low of 27 in 2024—a meaningful improvement, achieved against a backdrop of a growing global fleet. On Day of the Seafarer, that progress deserves recognition but so does the distance still to travel.

Not long ago in 2023, more than 30 seafarers died from asphyxiation in enclosed spaces, the second-highest annual toll in nearly three decades. Almost every one of those deaths occurred during planned, permitted work which, by definition, had gone through a safety authorization process. The permit system designed to keep seafarers safe did not fail because the procedures went wrong but rather because the paper processes lack the capabilities needed. In fact, conversely, paper typically adds to the admin and cognitive burden and pulls attention away from the actual safety process.

That is the challenge the industry now has the tools to address. The data on where and how these incidents occur has always existed. What has been missing is the digital infrastructure to make that data actionable in real time, across a fleet, in the hands of the people who can intervene before an incident rather than document one afterwards.

That gap matters more now than it did even a few years ago. Today, compliance with environmental regulations, commercial performance, and safety at sea are all intertwined – and all rely on standardized, integrated data flows. Seafarers are absorbing that complexity directly. A recent ISWAN survey of 400 seafarers across 29 countries found 53.8% reporting increased workload from decarbonization compliance, and 44% citing elevated stress. Manual administrative tasks, including permit management and safety reporting, can account for up to 20% of crew time. While undoubtedly important environmentally, every new regulatory layer—STCW amendments, EU ETS, FuelEU Maritime, expanding PSC enforcement—adds to that weight. That administrative increase rarely features in discussions about the cost of compliance, but it has a direct bearing on safety. Fatigued, overstretched crews make mistakes and the data on this is clear.

Digitalizing permit-to-work addresses this on two levels simultaneously. For crews, it reduces the administrative load of permit management, freeing their attention for the work itself. For shoreside teams, it changes the nature of their role entirely. Land-based safety managers gain fleet-wide, real-time visibility of ongoing permitted work, not as a periodic report to review afterwards but as a live operational picture they can act on. They can see when multiple high-risk permits are active simultaneously on the same vessel. They can analyze long-term historical data to identify which ship types, departments, or permit categories generate the most near-misses, and use that to drive smarter maintenance planning, scheduling, and risk prioritization across the fleet. The ship-to-shore connection, which has historically been one of shipping’s most significant safety blind spots, becomes a genuine operational asset.

Adding AI to permit-to-work is a deliberate choice because the data volumes involved exceed what any team can meaningfully review manually. Natural language interfaces mean a safety officer can describe the data view they need and receive an answer in seconds, rather than waiting for a monthly report that arrives too late to change anything. In an industry where the human and commercial stakes are high, this approach to AI is principle-based. The question we ask before committing to any AI capability is straightforward: does this genuinely improve efficiency and accuracy for the people using it? If the answer is not a clear yes, it does not get built.

Shipping’s path forward requires a connected digital ecosystem where data from each part of operations enables the feedback, continuity, and collaboration that drive both safety and efficiency. The insight is already there, in the data being generated every day across the global fleet. The infrastructure to surface it, and act on it, is also now available.

Day of the Seafarer is a moment to acknowledge both what has been achieved and what is still ahead. Seafarers are being asked to operate in conditions of growing complexity, with workloads that regulation has inadvertently increased. The least the industry can do is ensure the safety systems designed to protect them are genuinely capable of doing so.

By Esa Henttinen, Executive Vice President for Safety Solutions at NAPA.