The Propeller Club has always existed to bring maritime leadership together, to convene around the biggest issues facing the industry, to navigate adversity through shared perspective, and to celebrate our successes. It’s a place to both learn from and incite one another in the best ways possible.
We are undergoing one of the sector’s biggest technological shifts, pouring serious amounts of time and money into AI, with too much of it still failing to translate into clear financial or strategic reward or the better decisions we were promised. If elected, I’d like to help the Board evolve how we support leadership through this so AI stops arriving as another insufferable headline and starts sitting sensibly alongside everything else we discuss.
Much of this comes down to trust, which cannot exist without brand-agnostic ground to stand on, a common language to think in, and the freedom to speak entrepreneur to entrepreneur, because that is what we all are.
Most of what reaches us on AI comes instead sponsor-driven or in a vendor’s language built to sell a platform rather than to help us make a sound decision or question the shape of their truth.
Leadership is being pushed to deploy AI while the most challenging questions go unanswered: how AI gets governed inside a company, where it’s actually working, and who owns the outcome when it starts shaping decisions.
I recently launched Further Ventures, a maritime AI and digitalization think tank initiative, with George Xiradakis and the F&F team, to provide this sort of liminal space – symposium-style, unfiltered and unscripted. Our first expression on the Friday of Posidonia weekend drew a full house of commercial shipping operators and opened with a question that set the tone: “Who is responsible for the consequences of AI-influenced decisions?”
The room wasn’t looking for novelty, but a way in. Give people a frame they recognize and the wariness falls away. Let them participate on equal terms and suddenly they’re demanding and engaged rather than drifting.
Many of the panelists and attendees were Propeller Club members, proving this appetite already exists inside the Club. Building this common language is core to Further & Further and Further Ventures, and what I’d like to contribute to the Board if elected: the centaur work of translating between maritime leadership and emerging technologies, while averting misdirected condescension in either direction.
Many of you will also remember me from George Economou’s tech startup, EVIDENT, where we tokenized the first maritime asset, an LNG carrier. I spent most of this period trying to pull everyone off the blockchain and distributed-ledger technology language and onto the benefits: precise exposures in previously inaccessible verticals, fewer intermediaries and less paperwork, lower minimum ticket sizes. The moment I led with blockchain, what was heard was bitcoin, DOGE, some crypto scam. The same people happily KYC’d and joined though when I likened it to Amazon instead (even though it was more like Hermès, truth be told, but that came to me later), a way to reach attractive deal flow in alternative assets they would otherwise never have known existed. I imagine you see where I’m going with this.
We’re making the same mistake with AI. Thinking of it as a tool is the wrong mental model, and this matters more than might be obvious. AI is a strategic hire, not a tool. Call it a tool and you import everything you assume about tools: that it does the same thing every time, that it fails visibly when it breaks. You don’t onboard a hammer. A hire you handle differently. You define the role, you walk them through the workflow, you decide what they’re accountable for, and you stay close as conditions change. You would never hand a new hire the keys on day one and vanish, yet we do it with AI constantly.
The danger lies in our speed of adoption alongside our lack of discernment. Enormous sums of money are being thrown into AI, and much of it will be lost, the way it always is in a hype cycle, with the technology blamed for what in many cases were really failures of judgment or long-term implementation. Posidonia was teeming with companies waving their AI credentials – some serious, many little more than an API into ChatGPT etc with a chatbot and maritime window dressing. This makes the label all the harder to trust – what does “AI-enabled” even mean exactly? – and makes fluency more urgent.
The best protection any of us has is to develop our own fluency, enough literacy to follow what is happening and to vet what we are being sold. This is what I’d like to help build inside the Propeller Club as part of the Board of Governors.
My aim would be to fold this into the conversations we already have, rather than invent a tech arm or bolt another “AI in Maritime” session onto the calendar. Once we treat it as something we hire, part of the team rather than instead of it, it sits more naturally inside maritime strategy instead of looming over it. Something we take part in, rather than something happening to us.
Maritime leaders need to make more strategic, informed use of what’s already here to protect their competitive advantage and to work alongside the next generation already teaching itself how to make it work for them.
I’d be grateful to count on your vote.
Emma Collier
Founder and Managing Partner, Further Ventures
Founder and Partner, Strategy and Ventures, Further & Further
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