Shipfix: Unleashing AI’s Power to Boost Productivity with Spire Maritime’s AIS Data
Spire Maritime is committed to showcasing ML/AI-driven companies in the maritime industry and sharing their stories. Here, Antoine Grisay, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Shipfix shares how maritime and trade players leverage their collaborative workflow and data platform.
Shipfix’s AI addresses an age-old challenge in the shipping and trade industries: working through thousands of emails to identify actionable items and data, driven by groundbreaking AI-enabled tools.
Effortless Data Organization
The company’s AI platform automatically organizes emails by content or type for easy processing: cargo orders, tonnage circulars, operations, market reports, fixture recaps, etc.
Shipfix offers smart tagging, including tags’ suggestions and dedicated shipping filters. Shipfix automatically recognises tonnages, orders, companies, contacts, ports, and vessel characteristics in clients’ mailboxes and allows them to drill into those data points with links to respective Shipfix directories. The user can leverage over 200 cargo and tonnage filters and set up multiple inbox tabs to focus on various markets and specific business needs.
Streamlining Maritime Trades
Shipfix’s AI-driven tools process emails to extract key market data points and deduplicate circulars, providing live tonnage and cargo information. Structured cargo, tonnage and fixture data simplify a complex marketplace. All screens and tabs are fully customized to reflect the specific needs of each user. Tonnage and Orders market screens are connected to Vessels, Port and Company Directories, minimizing navigation through the mailbox.
Matching Cargo and Shipping Needs
AI is also utilized in Cargo and Ship matching tools to identify current market offers and arbitrage opportunities. The platform displays suitable offers by considering the current location of the vessel sailing to the desired destination within the required time period.
Shipfix’s AI deduplicates, anonymises, and normalizes aggregated clients’ data and produces market insights, covering supply (commercial fleet movement) and demand (advertised cargoes) as well as trade flows based on historical AIS vessel movements.
Aggregating Data for Smooth Sailing
The inspiration for Shipfix came from the main charterer’s problem: It is impossible to effectively navigate one’s mailbox when receiving up to 10,000 emails per day. The company’s AI offering solves this problem by aggregating, deduplicating and systemizing clients’ data and presenting a live environment, fully customized for the user’s needs, which is easy to “sail”.
Shipfix’s AI recognizes various data points in emails, including ships, cargoes, companies, people, and fixture details, even if there are typos or misspellings. This enables efficient work processes and provides unique shipping-specific filters across the platform.
Shipfix consolidates a multitude of data sources– information parsed from emails, their own Vessels and Ports Directories, Maps, and both Company and Market Insights on a single Platform to provide a new level of market intelligence and collaborative workflows.
Choosing The Right Data Partner
Spire Maritime was among the first data partners of Shipfix. Their choice of a maritime AIS and vessel tracking data provider was driven by many factors: most importantly, a reputable and trusted name in the industry, a plug-and-play API solution and comprehensive data covering a global commercial fleet.
Harnessing Precise Data for Accurate Predictions
The accuracy of Shipfix’s Distance Calculator and Voyage Estimator tools is a result of Spire Maritime’s AIS data, and instrumental in their better understanding of vessel movement patterns. Historical AIS is one of the building blocks in their algorithm to predict cargoes on voyages and build historical trade flows. Historical AIS data integrated into their Vessel Directory provides a snapshot of historical voyages and the vessel’s AIS position/status at any given time in the past.
Both Spire Maritime’s historical AIS data and real-time AIS data are integrated into Shipfix’s functionality, providing alternative vessels for a charterer’s weighted decision-making process.
Shipfix asserts that in the maritime industry, data should strive to be 100% accurate, and their clients keep asking for better, more accurate data. For instance, a gap in AIS data has a very negative impact, as it can prevent detection of a key event in a voyage lifecycle. Spire Maritimes’s D-AIS product enabled Shipfix to dramatically increase the accuracy of vessel voyages, especially in highly congested areas.
Shipfix says, given its great relationships with Spire Maritime, all new Spire product releases are closely watched and they look forward to increasing the scope of mutual partnerships in the future.
Machine Learning and AI Key Takeaways
Continuous improvement is required. Shipping emails are quite unique in their content. To recognize email type, understand the content, parse different data points (cargo orders, tonnage circulars, operations, market reports, fixtures), one needs to constantly improve machine learning and prediction algorithms. Shipfix focuses on extracting all content, deduplicating, structuring, and presenting it in a user-friendly way, rather than being limited to specific data points.
AI supports (but does not replace) maritime players. Machine learning doesn’t replace human beings behind their desks. Shipfix provides collaboration tools, increases efficiency in navigating through mailboxes, analyzes billions of data points and shows it as Company/Market trends. They don’t want to replace humans with AI, they would like to support them in their decisions.
“Client is King”
For Shipfix, machine learning is built to support their clients’ needs, and continuous improvement of AI-driven tools is based on suggestions from all daily client meetings. The “shortcut” for success is to listen to clients and fine-tune AI and the product roadmap.
Integrating machine learning and AI is becoming crucial in dealing with big datasets, live data extraction, analysis & interpretation. Taking into account the scale of the maritime industry the growing impact of AI is inevitable. AI is in Shipfix’s DNA: having started with email parsing and now constantly adding AI-driven tools.
Looking to the Future
The collaboration between Spire Maritime and Shipfix represents an exciting step forward in the maritime industry. Their partnership looks to the future, striving to create a comprehensive platform that will revolutionize the way commodity traders and maritime players operate.
Shipfix’s goal of providing an all-in-one solution for chartering and operational desks in the Dry Bulk and Tanker markets aligns perfectly with Spire Maritime’s expertise in data analytics and satellite technology. Together, they aim to enhance efficiency, streamline processes, and drive growth across the industry.
Learn more about how Spire Maritime’s AIS data can supercharge your company’s Machine Learning.