Marcura Group CEO Henrik Hyldahn joined The Maritime Executive podcast series to discuss the advent of AI tools for shipping professionals.
Hyldahn framed Marcura’s approach as augmentation rather than replacement, describing AI workflows that can create documents in minutes and review charterparties for inconsistencies—while keeping human specialists responsible for validation and final outcomes.
From voyage transaction know-how to AI-assisted operations
Marcura’s current management position comes after Marcura acquired ShipServ in 2023-4, with Hyldahn taking over as CEO of Marcura Group afterward. The acquisition combined Marcura’s experience on the voyage side of shipping transactions for charterers, traders and operators with ShipServ’s platform for managing vessel opex and procurement.
That combined base is where Marcura has started introducing AI tools intended to support daily work across modern vessel operations, rather than substituting for the people who sign off on decisions.
How Marcura says AI will handle charterparty and document work
Hyldahn said Marcura’s AI tools can create documents in minutes. In addition, the tools described in the conversation can review charterparties for inconsistencies, surfacing issues that could otherwise be missed until later stages.
The described value is tied to risk reduction: the inconsistencies identified by the AI tools are framed as mistakes that could cost thousands of dollars, with humans still required to validate the output.
Human validation and institutional knowledge are part of the design
Marcura’s AI approach is presented with a clear accountability boundary. Human specialists still have to validate the AI output and own the outcome, and the discussion ties operational mistakes to cascading effects in voyage management.
Beyond day-to-day review, the AI is also described as a way to capture institutional knowledge from existing staff—preserving skills and lessons-learned for the next generation of employees.
Hyldahn’s operating principle for AI: eliminate work, not decisions
Hyldahn told The Maritime Executive that “the first thing you want to use AI for is to eliminate as much of the work as possible — to get it completely automated and gone so that they focus on the decision side of things, on what are really the core value levers for them.”