Your car. Your smartphone. That bunch of bananas on your counter. Chances are all of these items made their way to you via ship. Roughly 90% of the world’s goods are transported by sea, according to the World Economic Forum.
And while there’s been a sustained push to cut the carbon emissions of cars and trucks, giant container ships have continued to be a major source of pollution. New regulations put in place by the International Maritime Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations, and others are now trying to move the industry toward a net-zero future. But it’s been slow going.
“[The shipping industry] has been around for a very, very long time,” said Dylan Keil, cofounder and CEO of Bearing AI. “And it has this reputation of being conservative, not adopting new technology quickly, kind of continuing on the same path for a long time.”
Given the new environmental regulations however, Keil believes those attitudes toward technology are changing. This is good news for his company, which sells itself as “the AI decision engine for the maritime shipping industry.”
“So for the first time, shipping companies can actually understand…the impact of every action they might take. So if that’s slowing down a vessel, let’s say from 12 and a half to 12.3 knots, if that’s changing where a vessel is deployed…they can know in real time what the impact is going to be to their emissions, to their fuel costs, to their overall profitability.”
Learn more about how Bearing AI, founded in 2019 and backed by AI pioneer Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, is helping the shipping industry reach its carbon-cutting goals in the video above.